Terra Incognita
Issue 63
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
December 3rd, 2008
1) Same terror, same story: Another terrorist attack. Another candle light vigil. Another media circus where the victims are blamed and the word “Muslim” isn’t used and the media uses callous phrases such as “in 2005 only 12 people died.” Same terror, same story. Now the media tells us to be ‘defiant’ in the face of terror. How do we ‘defy’ it? We “go about our daily lives and don’t let it affect us.” Why is it that in the face of genocide, hate crimes, murder, racism and massacre we are asked to ‘defy’ it by doing nothing. Was that how that American blacks were expected to react to lynchings? Defy the KKK by doing nothing? No. It is time to put out the candles and stop singing and mourning and time to start struggling against terrorism. It is every citizens duty to struggle against it, reliance on the government and the media to do the job has resulted in meager results and insult to the legacy and memory of the dead.
2) They died twice On the third day of the Mumbai massacre of 2008 the New York Times noted “It was not known if the Jewish Center was strategically chosen or if it was an accidental hostage scene.” This is but one example of how the media helps to murder the victims of terror twice. First the Muslim terrorist kills them. Then the media obscures the name of the terrorist, not referring to his religion, then it obscures the religion of the victims and pretends they were not targeted for their religion, then it even obscures the method of execution. The media is complicit in terror and future generations won’t know who carried out the Mumbai attacks or why.
3) Did the Jews steal the Holocaust from humanity? Recent intellectual outbursts, many of them by Jews, have claimed that the “Jews” monopolize the Holocaust and that the Jews are thus “stealing” it from humanity. The message is clear: the Jews need to share. What about the homosexuals and Gypsies and Slavic people who died in the Holocaust. But there is a second message that is less clear. Why is it Palestinians get their ‘Nakba’ and the Armenians get their Genocide and other people’s get to have their unique suffering, and alone among the world’s peoples the Jews are said to have ‘stolen’ and ‘monopolized’ and turned the Holocaust into an ‘industry’. Leftist journalists from the U.K are welcome to refer to the Armenian ‘Holocaust’ and the Palestinian ‘Holocaust’. Maybe Jews should call the Holocaust ‘Gukurahundi’, the Nedebele word for the genocide they suffered. Or will Jews then be said to have stolen the Gukurahundi from humanity?
4) Embarrassment of the Jewish people: Eitan Haber, the Jewish Agency and anti-semitism: Eitan Haber has said in an oped that “only in Israel do drug dealers facing the death penalty expect the State to save them.” He furthermore said the Jews were “pampered” and complain that their government should save wounded backpackers and other Jews who find themselves in trouble while vacationing abroad. There is one problem. Mr. Haber is on the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency. In the old days the Jewish Agency used to help Jews in distress, now it’s leaders encourage the death penalty for them and call Jews “pampered.”
Same terror, same story
November 30th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Once again non-Muslims are crying and weeping and lighting candles. This is the universal way that non-Muslims always deal with Muslim terror. We live in an insular world where history tells us that “people die in terror attacks” and that we must mourn by lighting some candles. Let Saeed Ahmed of CNN tell the story, as it will certainly be told to our grandchildren, most of whome will be Muslim (it will have to be told to them because our Muslim granddaughters won’t be taught how to read in their Muslim schools). Ahmed writes “Terror attacks have come with depressing regularity to Mumbai -- and each time the city, brought to its knees, has dusted itself off and forged on. It did so in March 1993 when more than 250 were killed in a series of bombings on the stock exchange, on trains and at hotels. It did so in August 2003 when two taxicabs loaded with explosives blew up outside a crowded market, killing 50. And again in July 2006, when bombs ripped through packed commuter trains and platforms during rush hour and took 209 lives.” Ahmed tells it like history will tell it. Taxi cabs blow up of their own accord, people just dut themselves off and go back to their daily lives, bombs just blow up of their own accord. Ahmed tells us who did it: “In a brazen series of coordinated attacks, gunmen swarmed ashore Wednesday night and launched attacks on nine locations in the city.” It was ‘brazen’ which is almost a synonym for ‘daring’ and thus a positive word. Those who carried it out were just ‘gunmen.’ Yet days earlier the media had informed us that “Hindu extremists” have been arrested in the past for terror attacks. In no report at CNN or the New York Times will readers be informed that the Deccan Mujahadeen, the group taking responsibility for it, are Muslims. But Haaretz informs us on November 30th that the named ‘Deccan’ points to it being a local group. Oddly enough the lone terrorist captured by Indian troops is from Pakistan.
The New York Times informs its readers that the Jewish Chabad house was either an ‘accidental’ or ‘strategic’ target. An interesting choice of words. The choice of words means that there will be no ‘hate crimes’ charges. There will be no racism or anti-semitism charges. There will be no use of the the U.K’s Universal Judicial Law to charge the terrorists with ‘war crimes.’ That law is only used against Israelis when leftist Englishmen decide to charge them with ‘war crimes’. In the UK the European has decided that since he can no longer colonize the entire world with his army he will at least use his laws to give himself ‘universal’ jurisdiction No, Muslim terrorists never get charged with war crimes. The surviving ‘gunman’ is named “Azam Amir Kasab” is from Pakistan and he is a Muslim. But the media won’t inform us of that. But the media, such as Christiane Amanpour, does tell us that in 2005 terror attacks in Delhi “only 12 people” died and that Muslims complain of ‘discrimination’ in India and that the Kashmir conflict may have forced Muslims to carry out these attacks. So the terrorists are the victims.
The man accused of being behind the terror may be one Dawood Ibrahim. He was also behind a 1993 series of 13 bombings in Mumbai that killed 250 people. Or maybe its ‘only’ 250. Ibrahim had a hard life being discriminated against. He was a mafia boss and then businessman and multi-millionare in Mumbai before he became a terrorist. Sure was a hard life for him, like Bin Laden, another rich person who decided one day to kill some non-Muslims. And it was non-Muslims who died in the November 27-30 terror attacks in Mumbai. A Turkish couple was released by the terrorists because they were Muslim. At the Jewish center: “Israeli media reported that some of the victims were found wrapped in prayer shawls, in accordance with Jewish burial tradition. The reports speculated that one of the hostages had wrapped the bodies before he was killed. According to unconfirmed reports attributed to Indian security sources, most of the hostages were found bound and gagged by the commandos, and had been shot long before Indian forces landed on the roof from a helicopter on Thursday night.” But that was apparently part of the large ‘accident’ in Mumbai that led to the death of 180 civilians, 20 Indian security force members and some 300 wounded. Nine people - most Israelis, some dual citizens but all of them Jews - were killed in an attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai, one of ten targets hit by terrorists. But this attack wasn’t anti-Jewish. According to the lone surviving terrorist “the terrorists were sent with a specific mission of targeting Israelis at Chabad House in order to avenge atrocities committed against the Palestinians.” See, its like all the anti-Israel protests by wealthy leftists in Europe, its not anti-Jewish, its just anti-Israel.
But tolerance and coexistence helped bring the terrorists and their victims together. The terrorist Muslims stayed at the Taj Hotel and also at the Nariman Chabad house. The Jews let the Muslims in and gave them meals and a bed. The Muslims expressed thir tolerance and thanks, they killed the Jews, through the women on the bed in one room and let one of the surviving ‘people of the book’ cover his brethren with a prayer shawls. Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance.
Terrorism is the thing we live with. It is our life. We are expected to go about it everyday and we are supposed to be ‘defiant’ by doing the same thing day after day no matter how many of us die. When they kill us our media doesn’t even say who they are. The media hires Muslims who report the news and those Muslims inform us that taxi cabs just ‘blow up’ and buses ‘blow up’. No people are involved in such things. Deccan Mujahadeen, a made up name, is said to be ‘local’ but oddly enough its member are Pakistani. But the media twists our minds even further, telling us that a ‘Kashmir conflict’ caused the terror along with ‘discrimination’ against Muslims. Then the media tells us “Hindu extremists have been blamed for terror attacks in the past.” So what does this mean? Muslims are discriminated against. Hindu extremists carry out terror attacks. Victims are just ‘accidentally’ killed by ‘gunmen’ in ‘brazen’ attacks.
And our response is to light some candles.
I will give Islam one thing. When Muslims die in terror they call for revenge. They protest and get angry. They say who carried out the attack. Baruch Goldstein, the Jew who gunned down 29 Muslims at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, doesn’t become a ‘militant’ ‘gunmen’ with a ‘brazen’ attack. He doesn’t ‘accidentally’ kill 30 Muslims. When he killed some Muslims the Europeans sent a special detail or ‘Temporary International Presence in Hebron’, staffed year-round by the children of wealthy leftist Europeans who otherwise couldn’t find jobs. If Muslims had died in Mumbai and if it was a Muslim center that was targeted we would know how they died and who killed them and there would be no description of it as an ‘accident’ and Muslims wouldn’t waste their time lighting candles and ‘defiantly’ doing the same thing the next day. No.
I will give the blacks of the American South one thing. When their people were strung up and lynched they didn’t call it an ‘accident’. They didn’t call it ‘brazen’. They didn’t say it was ‘strategic’. They didn’t say the KKK were ‘militants’ and ‘gunmen.’ I will give them some credit. They called the people who did it ‘murderers’ and ‘racists’ and the people who died were murdered because they were black, not as part of an elaborate accident.
I won’t give credit to the Indian government or its security forces. They failed miserably. They failed to understand the one thing that must be understood about Muslim terror. Muslim terrorists never release hostages alive. It has never happened in history ad it will never happen. The only way to deal with Muslim terror is to kill the terrorists as quickly as possible. Every minute that is allowed to pass the Muslim will kill more and more because that is what Muslim terror is about, it is about murdering poor people, civilians, women, children and non-Muslims. They failed to understand what Madagascar cannibals understood when Arab Muslim slave traders tried to colonize one of their outlying islands. The cannibals killed and ate the Muslims and the Muslims never came back. We can all learn from 14th century Madagascar cannibals, perhaps not dietary habits, but certainly in how to deal with terrorism. We can also learn from the story of the Sikh Gurus. Guru Tegh Bahadur, the 9th Guru, was asked by the Hindus of Kashmir who were being forcibly converted, raped and brutalized by the Muslim governor Iftikar Khan (1671-75) sent by Aurangzeb. The Hindu community leaders of Kashmir told the Muslim governor, on advice of the Sikh Guru, that they would convert their community to Islam if the Sikh leader could first be persuaded. The Guru was beheaded in 1675 for refusal to convert. But his death had an unintended consequence. Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th and last Guru, ordered the men to take up arms. According to the story “Guru Gobind decided to inculcate the martial spirit among his followers.” He ordered all the men to carry daggers as a religious obligation. He told them: “you will love the weapons of war, be excellent horsemen, marksmen and wielders of the sword, the discus and the spear. Physical prowess will be as sacred to you as spiritual sensitivity.” He spent most of his life fighting Islam and defeating the forces of Aurangzeb. Gobind Singh was no candle-lighter. He didn’t have vigils and his ‘defiance’ of Islam was not to ‘go back to life as normal as quickly as possible. His solution was to bring war to his enemies and to inculcate a martial spirit among his men. Among Sikh women he forbade the wearing of the veil, that symbol of evil. Such was his devotion to decency. Gobind Singh encouraged the Sikhs to learn that the hatred of Islam and its intolerance could only be met with strength. Other Hindu warriors of the Mughal period also understood this, such as Shivaji and Maharana Pratap. History must learn from this. Lighting candles exemplifies weakness. We will keep lighting them for our dead until there is no one left to light them and the only memory of us is melted wax. We should light candles for our dead enemies, then we could go about our daily lives in the normal manner and we would be living logically, rather than ‘defying’ our enemies by not daring to raise a hand against them. How far would the Civil Rights movement have gotten if, after each lynching, the response was to ‘show defiance by living life as if nothing happened? Put away the candles and the vigils for a time when we can light them in Mecca. Gobind Singh understood that. Madagascar’s cannibals understood it. Singh ordered the men to carry swords. The Cannibals sharpened their teeth for the struggle ahead. We must be prepared to do the same.
They Died Twice
Seth J. Frantzman
November 30th, 2008
“It was not known if the Jewish Center was strategically chosen or if it was an accidental hostage scene.” Who wrote these lines will never be known because they were hidden behind the title ‘from news reports.’ But it was printed in the New York Times on November 29th. Read the callous sentence again. The choice is between ‘strategic choice’ or ‘accident’. That is how the deaths of nine Jews, five of them Israelis and one a Jewish woman from mexico has been described. Of course the New York Times does not mention that they are all “Jewish.” They have been murdered twice. Most media outlets also do not mention that they died at the hands of Islamist terrorists. The media informs us that they died and that their deaths may have been ‘strategic’ or ‘accidental.’ Were they hit by a care? That is an accident. An accident means that something occurred unexpectedly, unintentionally, or by chance. Of course the media does happen to inform us a little more about the circumstances of the deaths at the Chabad house or Taj hotel. Some of the victims were bound and that the women had been “dumped on the beds inside one room…at least some were killed immediately after the terrorists took over [Chabad].” We don’t hear the details, but if we were allowed to hear them then we might learn that they had their throats cut like Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl, two other Jews who died ‘accidentally’ at the hands of ‘militants.’ We might hear how the terrorists went room to room and murdered only non-Muslims. The Nariman house run by Chabad was, so many media outlets informs us; “siezed by gunmen.” Or they are described as “militants”, as at CNN. Its interestign that they are called ‘militants’. We knew who used this word to describe them in the New York Times: Kieth Bradsher and Somini Sengupta in their article on the front page of the Times on November 29th. Were they ‘militant’ when they executed the hostages? Was that part of their ‘military straegy’.
It is always interesting to know that the death of people from terror is so nonchaantly passed off and those who murder, those terrorists, are always excused as if they are part of a legitimate conflict. They are just ‘gunmen’ or ‘assailants’ or ‘militants’. They are not ‘murderers’ or ‘racists’ or ‘anti-semites’ or ‘terrorists’. That is what our language has done for the victim and the murderer alike. Our language has turned the victim into an ‘accident’ or part of a ‘strategy’ and the man who murders her is part of a ‘struggle’ and he is a ‘victim of discrimination.’ He and his tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition and his grenades are ‘victims’.
Those who died from terrorism in Mumbai died twice. They died first at the hands of the Muslim terrorists who killed them. Then they died a second time when the media outlets such as the Times excused their deaths and turned them into ‘accidents.’ Christiane Amanpour of CNN expressed it best on November 27th. She noted that in 2001 “Islamic militants” attacked the Indian parlaiment building and “only 12 people were killed.” Only 12? That is how our world reacts to terrorism. Only a few dead. Only a few accidents today. In truth victims of terrorism are murdered twice, first by the terrorists and then by those who excuse their deaths and marginalzie them, obscuring the perpetrators and denying the victims their right to be honored.
Did the Jews steal the Holocaust from humanity?
November 20th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
In a recent book review by Ethan Bronner of the New York Times the author claims "suffering, even holocaust, [A.B] Yehoshua implies, aren’t the monopoly of the Jews." Robert Fisk of The Independent devotes an entire chapter in his book, The Great War for Civilization, to the "First Holocaust" of the Armenians in 1915. He has also termed it the "forgotten holocaust." But he goes further in his book, claiming that the Jews have made it so that no one may use the word holocaust with a capital 'h' because Jews have seemingly stolen it from humanity. In an article in the Independent entitled 'Israel's New Prophet', the former speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish agency, Araham Burg, claims that there is a "holocaust industry" (a term used previously by Norman Finkelstein and the title of his book) and that "Burg argues Israel has been too long imprisoned by its obsessive and cheapening use – or abuse – of the Holocaust as 'a theological pillar of Jewish identity.'" Burg claims the Jews must "set Germany free" and no longer burden her with guilt over the Holocaust. His book The Holocaust is Over, is bring published in England in order to further this goal apparently.
Tom Segev, an Israeli journalist, often condemns Israel for using the Holocaust as a "tool" and claims Ben-Gurion used to force nations to be "under an obligation to support the world's one Jewish state. (Le Monde Diplomatique April, 2001). He goes so far as to even suggest that it is only a misunderstanding to "describe Israel's Holocaust memory as a mere instrument of Zionist propaganda" because although Israel has "manipulated" the Holocaust "you cannot truly understand Israel without understanding the role of the Holocaust in the minds of its people. And unless you understand the enemy [Israel?] , you cannot make peace with him." Segev also suggested that Israel's Holocaust remembrance day, 27th of Nissan, be changed to conform with the U.N's January 27th lest Israel be someone selfish in keeping the Holocaust to herself.
Paula Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale University, has observed: “With regard to Israel, the Holocaust may be used to forestall political criticism and suppress debate." Amira Hass feels the same way, that Israel uses the Holocaust to "ward off criticism."
This idea that Israel and the Jews have thus stolen the Holocaust from humanity, denying others their right to use the word holocaust and also ignoring the suffering of other people's victimized by the Nazis is gaining ground. It is responsible for the way in which more and more European countries are seeking to remember 'genocide' rather than the Holocaust so that memorial days can be more 'multi-cultural.' It is interesting that multiculturalism cannot seem to even find a place for Jewish suffering and that the Holocaust of all things is twisted around so that it is called a 'Zionist tool', thus encouraging people to stop remembering the Holocaust in order to confront Zionism.
One of the strange twists of the claim that the Jews ‘use’ the Holocaust in order to ‘get away with crimes against the Palestinians’, a central theme in Avraham Burg’s book and in other anti-Israel propaganda is the way the claim works. The claim is that Israel uses the Holocaust as a shield against criticism. This is the same as the claim that Israel uses anti-semitism as a shield against criticism. The Critic and hater says this first in order cauterize his hatred so that he can say ‘see, I told you they would say I am anti-semitic.’ But what is odd about the idea that the Jews use the Holocaust and that Jews were harmed by the Holocaust and thus ‘take it out’ on the Palestinians (a claim also made by the British Historian Arnold Toynbee who, oddly, also claimed Israel was ‘like’ the Nazis-thus Israel suffers Nazism and is destined to become like the Nazis, so being a victim of Nazism makes one a Nazi, the true sin is thus being the victim, so victimhood is Nazism and the victim is thus the Nazi himself. Who is the actual historical German Nazi then?) But the other side of the story is ‘what would the world say about the occupation if there was no Holocaust?’ What about other nations who occupy things and abuse minorities, such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, China, Russia or Burma? They didn’t suffer a Holocaust. Yet they are criticized less. The message is clear. The Jews are hated because they are victims and the new liberalism hates Jews because they suffered the Holocaust, saying that the Jews must be hated more because he uses the Holocaust, making other liberals think ‘gee, you are right, it is my duty to fight against Israel because she can’t be allowed to get away with using the Holocaust in order to abuse another people.’ But what about the fact that the majority of Israel’s people aren’t Holocaust survivor descendants but rather, the inconvenient truth, descendants of Sephardim, Mizrahim, Russians, Indian and Ethiopian Jews. Don’t tell the liberal. Because without the ‘Israel uses the Holocaust’ excuse the leftist could’nt justify his extreme hatred of Israel and justify using the Holocaust, and Jewish suffering during it, as an excuse to hate Israel more under the guise of not letting it ‘get away with using the Holocaust as a shield.’ Israel is thus punished twice, first by suffering under the Nazis and then by people saying “we must not let the Jews use this in order to get sympathy, we must be more critical of them because they suffered the Holocaust and should know better.” But it is primarily a German Jewish affliction that says “Jews use the Holocaust, the Holocaust is an industry, the Holocaust makes Jews cause human rights abuses, the Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust.” It is descendants of German Jews, such as Amira Hass and Avraham Burg who truly use the Holocaust, they use it to condemn the Jewish people and to claim Jewish destiny is to be ‘Nazis’. Apparently German Jews suffer from a longing for return to their ancestral Germanic homeland, their spiritual secular assimilated center where they were the center of intellectual attention, and not being respected in Israel they have decided to destroy it, and being racist (Amos Alon, author of Pity of it All, and a German Jewish descendant, claimed Israel was no longer ‘his country’ once all the Russians and dark Sephardim came to it, Baruch Kimmerling used German words when describing Ariel Sharon as a natural born genocidist in Politicide) against the ‘dark’ and ‘disgusting’ and ‘savage’ Sephardim, they have decided to call the Jews ‘white’ and turn Jews into ‘Nazis’ and ‘Crusaders’ and apartheid European settlers. How else can one explain the proclivity among German Jews to claim Israel is ‘like the Nazis’ and that Israel uses the Holocaust as an ‘industry’ and Jews suffered Nazism and thus have a greater chance of ‘becoming Nazis’ and ‘becoming fascist’. Hannah Arendt, the lover of the German Nazi philosopher Heidegger, was the first to claim the Jews collaborated with the Nazis and that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust (while Germans were just ‘banal’) in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Avraham Burg and Amira Hass and the other German Jews will do whatever it takes to make Israel a new ‘Nazi Germany’, one they can once again flee from as refugees and one they can claim they once again survived, one they can once again claim to have been pure prophets who ‘spotted the fire first’ and said some prophetic (The Independent calls Burg a ‘prophet’) things such as ‘where they burn books they will burn people’. The claims never end: Jews use the holocaust as an industry and Jews need to free Germany of its guilt (because Jews are now ‘responsible’ for the guilt of the Germans?) and Jews are destined to be Nazis and Jews use the Holocaust to shield themselves from criticism and Jews were responsible as actors in the Holocaust. And, as if that’s not enough, Jews even dominate the Holocaust and deny others their status as victims. How debased can the Yekkes become? What would intellectual Jews do without the Holocaust and Jews to blame for it? Why must all the Jews who didn’t suffer the Holocaust be shouldered with it so that they are either ‘using’ it or ‘abusing’ it or ‘dominating’ it or ‘destined to do it to others’? Why can’t we be freed of being blamed for it and why can’t Jews be allowed to be victims like everyone else of something that happened, primarily, to them. And why can’t Europeans be blamed for the thing they themselves did: the Holocaust, so that it doesn’t get twisted around so the Europeans get to be the ‘good’ people protesting in Hebron against the ‘Nazi’ Israelis. Why do the perpetrators get to once again take out their hatred, their new ‘human rights’ fad on the Jews and accuse Jews of shielding themselves from criticism, thus giving the Europeans an excuse to criticize the Jews. One must say it again. The Europeans did the Holocaust. It was in Europe. Europe built the gas chambers and put people in them and it is Europeans who are to blame for it, Europeans and a twisted part of their secular civilization. Europeans aren’t banal, they were the real Nazis and only Europe could have produced them, just as only Europe can produce a certain type of pasty faced extremist hating ‘human rights’ activist (by contrast the partisans who fought the Nazis, such as the Serbs, were also European whose source was in a very different portion of European history).
It is interesting that the Jews, alone among the world's peoples, are accused of being almost 'racist' for merely desiring to memorialize their own suffering during the Holocaust, one that was in many respects unique in human history. No other country or people is told that by memorializing its own history it is 'monopolizing' that history. Are Tutsis in Rwanda expected to stoop recalling the Rwandan Genocide lest they be seen as 'racist' against other African tribes, a few of whose people might have also suffered from the genocide. Should the Armenians be more inclusive with Armenian Genocide day and make sure to recall that some other people, such as Pontic Greeks, also suffered. Should the Ndebele people of Zimbabwe stop recalling the Gukurahundi, their word for the Robert Mugabe sponsored genocide of them in the 1980s? Do African-Americans have to stop memorializing slavery because they are not sharing it with white indentured servants and Native-Americans who also were enslaved? And what of the Nakba, are the Palestinians 'monopolizing' it by making it a selfish Palestinian event when others, such as Armenians, also fled their homes?
This is the true irony, that whereas the world desires to use the word Holocaust for all sorts of other genocides and Israel is accused of abusing the Holocaust, that the Palestinians are not accused of using the Nakba as a 'tool' or depriving others of the world. Perhaps the Jews suffered a 'Nakba' when 700,000 of them were forced to flee their former homes in Arab and Muslim countries after 1948. Maybe the Jews had a Gukurahundi in 1919 in the Ukraine when numerous Jews were massacred? But if Jews were to use the word Nakba and Gukurahundi one might suddenly find that these words were also being 'monopolized' by the Jews and that some Polish peasants killed in 1919 and Maltese forced to flee Egypt in 1952 were being left out by a 'chauvinistic' Jewish narrative. The message is clear; if the Jews suffer and dare to recall their suffering they are manipulating and stealing the memories of others and they are not suffering uniquely. But everyone else who suffers is suffering uniquely, whether they be Armenians, Tutsis or Palestinians. This is the real antisemitism.
Embarrassment of the Jewish people: Eitan Haber, the Jewish Agency and anti-semitism
November 26th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
The Jewish Agency’s Eitan Haber recently claimed on November 26th, 2008 in Yidiot Ahranot’s Ynet: “only in Israel do drug dealers facing the death penalty expect the State to save them” This is tantamount to saying that Only in Israel do people care about their citizens abroad. Is he ignorant of the fact that his is common? It seems he cannot be completely ignorant of the world, he used to work for the Prime Minister and serves on the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency.
But if he is ignorant lets remind him:
Mexico intervenes to stop execution of Mexicans in U.S
Saudi helps Muslim citizens abroad
England helped women in Sudan
Australia intervened to help death row citizen in Cambodia, women in Indonesia and man in Guatananamo
Canada intervened to help nurses beheaded in Saudi
U.S intervened to stop caning of American in Singapore
So what else is behind this. Is he an anti-Semite? Those like him who have an Israeli-Judeo-Centric view of the world also claim that “only Israel” commits certain crimes and that Israel is the “worst” whether it is ‘racism’ or ‘human rights abuses’ or ‘apartheid’ or ‘religious intolerance’ or ‘sex trafficking’. Why is Israel singled out? Because as self-hating Jews they believe Jews are uniquely important and thus uniquely evil. Thus when a Jew dares to express concern that a Jew will be executed for drug smuggling it is “only the Jews do this.” If an Arab government intervenes on behalf of its people abroad there is no such outcry of “only Arabs do this.” In the opposite, it is seen as positive that they have solidarity with their own.
But it’s not the first anti-Semite to come out of the Jewish Agency. Avraham Burg was first. He compares Israel to the Wiemer republic, claims the acquisition of the Golan was an ‘Anschluss’ and that Israel uses the Holocaust as an excuse to harm others and that the Holocaust is also an ‘industry’. His book, The Holocaust is over, rise from its ashes is, unsurprisingly a best seller in Israel and among wealthy leftist Jews and is prominently displayed in the Stimetsky’s chain of book stores, just as Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby was. Jews like to believe the worst about themselves, especially if it has them controlling the world’s governments and foreign policy and using the Holocaust as an ‘industry’ in order to ‘gain sympathy’ so that ‘Jews can commit human rights abuses against Palestinians.’
What is odd about the ‘Jewish’ Agency is that it is involved in other anti-Jewish activities. There is also the heads of the Jewish Agency who have fought against bringing Asian Jews to Israel and other Jewish people. So why is this organization, that is supposed to help Jews, becoming anti-Semitic? Is it because they talk so much about Jews that they become tainted, they become anti-Semitic out of self hatred and being exposed to to much Jewishness? What is wrong with the Jewish Agency. No one expects that every Jew will have a knee-Jerk reaction and want to help the two Israelis sentenced to death in Thailand but one does not expect a member of the Jewish Agency’s board to encourage their execution. Would he encourage the execution of an Arab drug smuggler in Israel?
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Terra Incognita 62 Rwandas Kabuye, Aid to Africa and the Gaza boats
Terra Incognita
Issue 62
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 24th, 2008
1) France’s Shame: Rose Kabuye and the story of all the Tutsis: Rose Kabuye, a former mayor of Rwanda’s capital and a colonel in the Rwandan rebel group that liberated the country from the genocidaires has been arrested in Germany on an EU arrest warrant issued in France. Her charge? War crimes. But France has never issued an arrest warrant for the Hutu leadership who carried out the genocide, a leadership armed and supported by France. France is a disgraceful nation and it is about to do the equivalent of prosecuting the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto fighters for ‘war crimes’ against the Nazis.
2) Why Aid to Africa fails, miserably: Every year we hear more about ‘millennium’ goals and Live 8 and all sorts of other Western ideas about ‘saving Africa’. Every year there are new goals and new ideas on how best to help Africans. Aid fails because it is predicated on the simple idea that “we can help them.” We cannot. We could not have helped the Irish during the Famine or the Americans during the Dust Bowl. We cannot bring 21st century technology to African villages existing on early 20th century jerry-rigged technology. We must end the addiction to ‘saving’ Africa and let it save itself.
3) Not one cent for Gilad The leftist activists behind the ‘Free Gaza Boat’ initiative have a snazzy posh new yacht. They are now on their third ‘blockade busting’ protest tour of Gaza. Wealthy Europeans and Americans and other pasty face rich folk are among them, enjoying dinner at the Hamas president’s palace. But while they rake in the Euros for their liberalism there will not be one cent or one letter or one checkup on the Israeli soldier taken hostage there. The leftist Europeans dance on his grave, perhaps no differently than they dance on the graves of the 6 million Jews destroyed during the Holocaust and buried under the soil of Europe.
France’s Shame: Rose Kabuye and the story of all the Tutsis
Seth J. Frantzman
November 19th, 2008
Rose Kabuye was born in 1961 in the village of Kanyange in northern Rwanda. She was born into the Tutsi tribe, a minority in Rwanda. Like many Tutsis who were discriminated against by the Hutu led government she went to Uganda to search for work and in the 1980s joined the revolutionary Rwandan Patriotic Front, then led by Paul Kagame. She rose to the rank of Colonel in the guerrilla army and when the Rwandan genocide broke out in 1994 she joined Kagame in the swift liberation of the capital from the genocidal Hutu regime. But it was too late for hundreds of thousands of her people who had been butchered in no small part due to the work of the French government in opposing U.N intervention, supplying their Francophile Hutu allies with machetes and whipping up world opinion against the Tutsi.
Kabuye has become an accidental inspiration to women in Africa. After becoming mayor of Kigali, the capital, she noted in an interview that “I never knew anything about gender studies. I was one of few women in the army. I was the only woman mayor during my tenure.” But on November 9th, 2008 the European Union, which had done nothing to prevent the genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda, caught up with her. What the French supplied machetes could not do in Rwanda, the courts in France intend to do. She is to be charged with murdering the former president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, an event that was used by Hutu extremists as an excuse to begin their long-planned genocide.
The arrest of Kabuye may be the greatest miscarriage of justice this century has yet seen. It is the equivalent of having arrested the surviving Jewish members of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and trying them for war crimes at Nuremburg. It is all the more galling considering the fact that not one Frenchman has ever been charged in a French court for the numerous crimes committed during the French colonial occupations of much of Africa, an occupation that helped set in motion numerous tribal and religious conflicts, through the imposition of European-drawn borders upon Africans.
Is Kabuye a new Dreyfus? Her tall statue, her stately frame, her sharp eyes and modest demeanor may well have helped her become one, save one problem: her black skin. She is not a European. Western Europeans are not arrested on European war crimes warrants, even for crimes committed in the not-so-distant past during colonialism. The European message of post-colonialism was ‘all is forgotten.’ So no former colony’s arrest warrant will be respected in Europe. But for the victims of colonialism there is no such justice. The European International Court of Justice only applies to non-Europeans or in selective case the ‘Barbarous Eastern Europeans’. So Charles Taylor of Liberia is on trial and General Nkunda of the Congo is threatened with trial. But former Nazis roam free in Hungary and Austria, many allowed early release because of their ‘advanced age’, lest they be forced to spend the last years of their lives in prison.
European justice has often tried to reach out and arrest Israeli Jews on ‘war crimes’. Ms. Kabuye has said she welcomes her day in court. But we should not stand silent. A woman stands imprisoned in Germany, where Nazism once ran wild, and is to be extradited to France, a nation whose government collaborated in the Rwandan genocide. She and her people were victims of genocide, just as the Jews were. Yet today European ‘justice’ seems to find a way to always indict the victims of European colonialism and the European Holocaust. It is time for us to once again say “J’ Accuse”. We accuse France of complicity in the Rwandan genocide and we will not stand by while an African woman whose entire family and village was wiped off the map during the Rwandan Genocide is held hostage in a European court with blood on its hands.
Why Aid to Africa fails, miserably
November 2nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Most recent books on Africa's '50 years since independence' have told the story of one woe after another. Primitive societies, Aids epidemic, famine, poverty, drought, genocide, disease, malaria, corruption, dictatorship, war, tribalism. For each problem there has been a 'solution' in the form of more and more romantic notions of Africa fed to us daily by the western media and various NGOs and 'non-profits' exhorting us to 'save Africa'. Africa is full of it. Stories of some random white person from Europe of the U.S who has gone to Africa to 'build a school' or 'help the poor'. They return with their requisite 'pictures of me with starving African children' and they go on with their daily lives. And each few years we hear more cries for more aid and more help. A few years ago it was 'Live 8', the concerts in a variety of European nations that was supposed to raise money to 'cancel the debt of African countries.' There is Madonna who did her part by adopting a smiling African child, 'saving him'. And yet, year after year, it does not get better, it gets worse. And year after year there is a new theme in international aid. In the old days the solution was mega-projects such as dams and power plants. Those fell apart over the years when do-gooders decided that there was some new fad. Maybe the fad was some new seeds for the Africans, or new schools, or irrigation, or throwing bags of rice from the back of trucks. Now aid takes the form of white SUVs driven by white people around the countryside, stopping to take pictures of the natives, and then moving on their way, sending the pictures back to the civilized world and asking for more donations to keep the SUV in top-top shape with the latest in GPS and onboard DVD devices.
Why doesn't it work. Billions of dollars have been injected. Millions of different programs have been tried. And it doesn't work. The schools that were built by the peace corps fall into ruins. The clinics fall apart. The irrigation ditches are filled in. The power stations are stripped bare. And there are still millions of Africans with distended bellies, living in a continent that is neither unique nor over-populated (one of the great myths of Africa is that there are too many people in it which results in famine and water contamination, but it is actually one of the most sparsely inhabited places).
So why doesn't it work? Why can't we save them? Allan G. Reitzes in his 'How Can we really mean it?' article published in the Jerusalem Post on September 8th, 2008 may give us a clue. Reitzes isn't speaking about Africa. He is speaking about Ethiopian Jews in Israel and why we have failed to 'save them'. By saving them he gives us a few yardsticks by which to measure their success and ours "Ethiopian Jewry is here but its successful integration remains in doubt…only limited positive results in bringing this community fully into Israeli society…they suffer debilitating stresses..few job skills…our failure to account for the immigrant generation's many personal and collective needs…these young people live in a traditional community that has been shattered…it leads to stereotyping as ignorant, backward and uncooperative…lower expectations…the community has become dependent." Mr. Reitzes speaks here about Africans living in Israel but the question of integration can well be a symbol for the world's hopes for Africa. It needs to be brought up to the standards of the world, that is the goal. We want it to integrate. Supposedly.
Reitzes offers us some pillars that will guarantee success. Let them speak for themselves:
1) It is necessary to support and [for us] to understand traditional customs.
2) Leadership and Community development [by us for them]
3) Planning among the governmental and non-governmental organizations…programs
4) Build the capacity of existing Ethiopian cultural non-profits
5) Fund professionals to work with these religious and cultural groups
6) Find the connections for this way of life to be integrated
7) A national level coalition should be created
8) Fund literacy programs
9) Fund local and national employment access rights and advocacy initiatives and use legal aid
10) increase staff...
Now go back and add up the number of these pillars which actually employ Ethiopians. Read it again. The 'pillars' consist of hiring whites, in this case non-Ethiopian Jews, and giving money to solve the problem. "Fund professionals." This means hiring a wealthy westerner to save the blacks. This is always the policy. To save the blacks the solution is always the same: Hire white man and add money. It’s like one of those quick-make soups. Just add white woman and money and stir. But Africa is not a soup. We are not noodles.
The 'failure' in our attempt to save Africa is the very basis that we begin from. We assume that it is our responsibility to save them and that only we can do it. While we romanticize their 'primitive' culture and their village utopias and we all desire to have pictures taken with them we also believe that we can save them. It is quite a brilliant proposal. When we were savage and poor and committing genocides they didn't come to save us. One can hardly imagine if, during the Irish potato famine, wealthy Africans in suits had shown up in SUVs to 'save the Irish'. And how would the Irish be today if rich Africans had shown up and built the starving Irish a giant power plant next to them and then dug some wells and thrown sacks of grain at them and driven away. How would America have been different if, during the Great Dust bowl, Africans had driven around the Midwest in SUVs throwing sacks at poor whites and giving them a lecture on planting corn and then driven off. Or maybe they would have stopped long enough to build a school house and take pictures with the children.
It seems ridiculous when we imagine our own history of poverty, famine and savagery and try to imagine Africans living in special compounds with SUVs, driving out to see us from time to time and throwing money and food at us and lecturing us on the use of condoms. Silly. But that is what we do. We go to save them. We throw a condom at them, throw some bags of flour at them, build a school house and take a picture. And this is supposed to 'save' them.
And then we return to our countries and draw up 'new plans' for 'new programs' for them. Programs that entail hiring more of us to save more of them. There are successful Ethiopians in Israel. When asked by the Jewish Agency, "can you please come and provide testimony for our donors on how we funded your integration," they have replied "I received nothing." Nothing. The answer to Africa is nothing. No more. No more condoms. No More aid. No more SUVs. No more white women taking pictures with black children. No more school houses. No more clinics. No more tear-jerking articles. No more. Stop. Stop the addiction to Africa. Stop the addiction to 'saving them'. Let them stand up. Let them be humans again, rather than objects of salvation. We didn't help the Irish. Some of them died, and tragic as it was, the potato famine helped Ireland. The Dust bowl helped America. And even if these things didn't help, we can rest assured that no amount of wealthy people in SUVs could have done anything to help. Sometime poor people need to be left alone. It may seem hard, it may seem brutal, but sometimes a man can only climb a mountain if he is not provided with North Face jackets and ropes to do so. Sometimes he must find his own path.
Not one cent for Gilad
November 11th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
All the celebrities are there. Amira Hass. Following in the footsteps of Jeff Halper, the president of the Israel Committee Against Home Demolitions and Lauren Booth, a relative of Tony Blair. A dozen European parliamentarians are there, including a former member of the Blair administration. They have feasted at the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s palace. They have received 240,000 Euros in donations to buy a classy yacht named dignity. But there will not be a cent for Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier abducted by Hamas in June of 2006. Not one of the European parliamentarians will attempt to meet with Gilad. Neither will the Israeli ‘activists’ and ‘journalists’ such as Amira Hass. Instead they will add their support to Islamism, to religious extremism and to hatred and intolerance. Why is it like this? Why do ‘human rights activists’ so rarely work to actually provide humans with rights? Why are extreme leftist Europeans so often callous towards the lives of Jews?
The history behind the ‘free Gaza’ movement and its well funded campaign from Europe is a history of shame. It is a history that goes back to the Red Cross and its involvement in the Second World War. During the Second World War the precursor of modern human rights movements, the Red Cross, was called upon to deliver letters and food packages to Jews and POWs held by the Nazi regime. It was also called upon to report on the condition of the concentration camps. However the Red Cross actually worked to help gloss over Nazi crimes by only showing the positive side of Nazism, by working with Nazi minders and touring the ‘model camp’ of Thereisenstadt. The Red Cross thus worked to excuse Nazi crimes and did not request access to other Nazi camps or their Jewish inmates. The shame of the Red Cross’s involvement does not end there. When the Nazis abandoned Thereseinstadt on April 22nd they handed the keys to the gate over to the Red Cross. The Red Cross ran the camp until it was liberated on May 8th by the Red Army. This means that the Jews of Theresienstadt were not liberated from the Nazis but actually had to be liberated from the clutches of the Red Cross, which refused them permission to leave the camp.
Today the Red Cross operates freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It provides medical care and services only to Palestinians. It does not provide any assistance to Jews and has rarely documented human rights violations against Jews in Israel. In Gaza the Red Cross does not work to provide care packages to Gilad or letters to him from his family. The descendants of the Red Cross, modern day ‘human rights’ organizations also do not provide any assistance to Gilad or his family and they neither protest on his behalf nor do they demand the right to see him when their members are in Gaza. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch do not provide reports documenting his detention. This is all the more shameful in Amnesty’s case because it has worked throughout the world to provide support for political prisoners and those illegally held by governments or terrorist movements, such as the FARC in Columbia.
There is a deep sadness in seeing European parliamentarians waving Palestinian flags and smiling from a posh yacht on their way back and forth from Gaza. It is disturbing to know that no European chartered such boats to save the Jewish refugees trying in vain to flee Europe in 1939. There was not one cent for those Jews just as there is not one cent for Gilad today. Every European donor to the free Gaza movement should be ashamed. While the residents of Gaza deserve a better life there is no excuse that time and again Jews are denied even the most basic human rights from human rights organizations and that callous human rights activists can walk on the soil of Gaza, over the very head of Gilad’s prison, and not request to see him.
Issue 62
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 24th, 2008
1) France’s Shame: Rose Kabuye and the story of all the Tutsis: Rose Kabuye, a former mayor of Rwanda’s capital and a colonel in the Rwandan rebel group that liberated the country from the genocidaires has been arrested in Germany on an EU arrest warrant issued in France. Her charge? War crimes. But France has never issued an arrest warrant for the Hutu leadership who carried out the genocide, a leadership armed and supported by France. France is a disgraceful nation and it is about to do the equivalent of prosecuting the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto fighters for ‘war crimes’ against the Nazis.
2) Why Aid to Africa fails, miserably: Every year we hear more about ‘millennium’ goals and Live 8 and all sorts of other Western ideas about ‘saving Africa’. Every year there are new goals and new ideas on how best to help Africans. Aid fails because it is predicated on the simple idea that “we can help them.” We cannot. We could not have helped the Irish during the Famine or the Americans during the Dust Bowl. We cannot bring 21st century technology to African villages existing on early 20th century jerry-rigged technology. We must end the addiction to ‘saving’ Africa and let it save itself.
3) Not one cent for Gilad The leftist activists behind the ‘Free Gaza Boat’ initiative have a snazzy posh new yacht. They are now on their third ‘blockade busting’ protest tour of Gaza. Wealthy Europeans and Americans and other pasty face rich folk are among them, enjoying dinner at the Hamas president’s palace. But while they rake in the Euros for their liberalism there will not be one cent or one letter or one checkup on the Israeli soldier taken hostage there. The leftist Europeans dance on his grave, perhaps no differently than they dance on the graves of the 6 million Jews destroyed during the Holocaust and buried under the soil of Europe.
France’s Shame: Rose Kabuye and the story of all the Tutsis
Seth J. Frantzman
November 19th, 2008
Rose Kabuye was born in 1961 in the village of Kanyange in northern Rwanda. She was born into the Tutsi tribe, a minority in Rwanda. Like many Tutsis who were discriminated against by the Hutu led government she went to Uganda to search for work and in the 1980s joined the revolutionary Rwandan Patriotic Front, then led by Paul Kagame. She rose to the rank of Colonel in the guerrilla army and when the Rwandan genocide broke out in 1994 she joined Kagame in the swift liberation of the capital from the genocidal Hutu regime. But it was too late for hundreds of thousands of her people who had been butchered in no small part due to the work of the French government in opposing U.N intervention, supplying their Francophile Hutu allies with machetes and whipping up world opinion against the Tutsi.
Kabuye has become an accidental inspiration to women in Africa. After becoming mayor of Kigali, the capital, she noted in an interview that “I never knew anything about gender studies. I was one of few women in the army. I was the only woman mayor during my tenure.” But on November 9th, 2008 the European Union, which had done nothing to prevent the genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda, caught up with her. What the French supplied machetes could not do in Rwanda, the courts in France intend to do. She is to be charged with murdering the former president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, an event that was used by Hutu extremists as an excuse to begin their long-planned genocide.
The arrest of Kabuye may be the greatest miscarriage of justice this century has yet seen. It is the equivalent of having arrested the surviving Jewish members of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and trying them for war crimes at Nuremburg. It is all the more galling considering the fact that not one Frenchman has ever been charged in a French court for the numerous crimes committed during the French colonial occupations of much of Africa, an occupation that helped set in motion numerous tribal and religious conflicts, through the imposition of European-drawn borders upon Africans.
Is Kabuye a new Dreyfus? Her tall statue, her stately frame, her sharp eyes and modest demeanor may well have helped her become one, save one problem: her black skin. She is not a European. Western Europeans are not arrested on European war crimes warrants, even for crimes committed in the not-so-distant past during colonialism. The European message of post-colonialism was ‘all is forgotten.’ So no former colony’s arrest warrant will be respected in Europe. But for the victims of colonialism there is no such justice. The European International Court of Justice only applies to non-Europeans or in selective case the ‘Barbarous Eastern Europeans’. So Charles Taylor of Liberia is on trial and General Nkunda of the Congo is threatened with trial. But former Nazis roam free in Hungary and Austria, many allowed early release because of their ‘advanced age’, lest they be forced to spend the last years of their lives in prison.
European justice has often tried to reach out and arrest Israeli Jews on ‘war crimes’. Ms. Kabuye has said she welcomes her day in court. But we should not stand silent. A woman stands imprisoned in Germany, where Nazism once ran wild, and is to be extradited to France, a nation whose government collaborated in the Rwandan genocide. She and her people were victims of genocide, just as the Jews were. Yet today European ‘justice’ seems to find a way to always indict the victims of European colonialism and the European Holocaust. It is time for us to once again say “J’ Accuse”. We accuse France of complicity in the Rwandan genocide and we will not stand by while an African woman whose entire family and village was wiped off the map during the Rwandan Genocide is held hostage in a European court with blood on its hands.
Why Aid to Africa fails, miserably
November 2nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Most recent books on Africa's '50 years since independence' have told the story of one woe after another. Primitive societies, Aids epidemic, famine, poverty, drought, genocide, disease, malaria, corruption, dictatorship, war, tribalism. For each problem there has been a 'solution' in the form of more and more romantic notions of Africa fed to us daily by the western media and various NGOs and 'non-profits' exhorting us to 'save Africa'. Africa is full of it. Stories of some random white person from Europe of the U.S who has gone to Africa to 'build a school' or 'help the poor'. They return with their requisite 'pictures of me with starving African children' and they go on with their daily lives. And each few years we hear more cries for more aid and more help. A few years ago it was 'Live 8', the concerts in a variety of European nations that was supposed to raise money to 'cancel the debt of African countries.' There is Madonna who did her part by adopting a smiling African child, 'saving him'. And yet, year after year, it does not get better, it gets worse. And year after year there is a new theme in international aid. In the old days the solution was mega-projects such as dams and power plants. Those fell apart over the years when do-gooders decided that there was some new fad. Maybe the fad was some new seeds for the Africans, or new schools, or irrigation, or throwing bags of rice from the back of trucks. Now aid takes the form of white SUVs driven by white people around the countryside, stopping to take pictures of the natives, and then moving on their way, sending the pictures back to the civilized world and asking for more donations to keep the SUV in top-top shape with the latest in GPS and onboard DVD devices.
Why doesn't it work. Billions of dollars have been injected. Millions of different programs have been tried. And it doesn't work. The schools that were built by the peace corps fall into ruins. The clinics fall apart. The irrigation ditches are filled in. The power stations are stripped bare. And there are still millions of Africans with distended bellies, living in a continent that is neither unique nor over-populated (one of the great myths of Africa is that there are too many people in it which results in famine and water contamination, but it is actually one of the most sparsely inhabited places).
So why doesn't it work? Why can't we save them? Allan G. Reitzes in his 'How Can we really mean it?' article published in the Jerusalem Post on September 8th, 2008 may give us a clue. Reitzes isn't speaking about Africa. He is speaking about Ethiopian Jews in Israel and why we have failed to 'save them'. By saving them he gives us a few yardsticks by which to measure their success and ours "Ethiopian Jewry is here but its successful integration remains in doubt…only limited positive results in bringing this community fully into Israeli society…they suffer debilitating stresses..few job skills…our failure to account for the immigrant generation's many personal and collective needs…these young people live in a traditional community that has been shattered…it leads to stereotyping as ignorant, backward and uncooperative…lower expectations…the community has become dependent." Mr. Reitzes speaks here about Africans living in Israel but the question of integration can well be a symbol for the world's hopes for Africa. It needs to be brought up to the standards of the world, that is the goal. We want it to integrate. Supposedly.
Reitzes offers us some pillars that will guarantee success. Let them speak for themselves:
1) It is necessary to support and [for us] to understand traditional customs.
2) Leadership and Community development [by us for them]
3) Planning among the governmental and non-governmental organizations…programs
4) Build the capacity of existing Ethiopian cultural non-profits
5) Fund professionals to work with these religious and cultural groups
6) Find the connections for this way of life to be integrated
7) A national level coalition should be created
8) Fund literacy programs
9) Fund local and national employment access rights and advocacy initiatives and use legal aid
10) increase staff...
Now go back and add up the number of these pillars which actually employ Ethiopians. Read it again. The 'pillars' consist of hiring whites, in this case non-Ethiopian Jews, and giving money to solve the problem. "Fund professionals." This means hiring a wealthy westerner to save the blacks. This is always the policy. To save the blacks the solution is always the same: Hire white man and add money. It’s like one of those quick-make soups. Just add white woman and money and stir. But Africa is not a soup. We are not noodles.
The 'failure' in our attempt to save Africa is the very basis that we begin from. We assume that it is our responsibility to save them and that only we can do it. While we romanticize their 'primitive' culture and their village utopias and we all desire to have pictures taken with them we also believe that we can save them. It is quite a brilliant proposal. When we were savage and poor and committing genocides they didn't come to save us. One can hardly imagine if, during the Irish potato famine, wealthy Africans in suits had shown up in SUVs to 'save the Irish'. And how would the Irish be today if rich Africans had shown up and built the starving Irish a giant power plant next to them and then dug some wells and thrown sacks of grain at them and driven away. How would America have been different if, during the Great Dust bowl, Africans had driven around the Midwest in SUVs throwing sacks at poor whites and giving them a lecture on planting corn and then driven off. Or maybe they would have stopped long enough to build a school house and take pictures with the children.
It seems ridiculous when we imagine our own history of poverty, famine and savagery and try to imagine Africans living in special compounds with SUVs, driving out to see us from time to time and throwing money and food at us and lecturing us on the use of condoms. Silly. But that is what we do. We go to save them. We throw a condom at them, throw some bags of flour at them, build a school house and take a picture. And this is supposed to 'save' them.
And then we return to our countries and draw up 'new plans' for 'new programs' for them. Programs that entail hiring more of us to save more of them. There are successful Ethiopians in Israel. When asked by the Jewish Agency, "can you please come and provide testimony for our donors on how we funded your integration," they have replied "I received nothing." Nothing. The answer to Africa is nothing. No more. No more condoms. No More aid. No more SUVs. No more white women taking pictures with black children. No more school houses. No more clinics. No more tear-jerking articles. No more. Stop. Stop the addiction to Africa. Stop the addiction to 'saving them'. Let them stand up. Let them be humans again, rather than objects of salvation. We didn't help the Irish. Some of them died, and tragic as it was, the potato famine helped Ireland. The Dust bowl helped America. And even if these things didn't help, we can rest assured that no amount of wealthy people in SUVs could have done anything to help. Sometime poor people need to be left alone. It may seem hard, it may seem brutal, but sometimes a man can only climb a mountain if he is not provided with North Face jackets and ropes to do so. Sometimes he must find his own path.
Not one cent for Gilad
November 11th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
All the celebrities are there. Amira Hass. Following in the footsteps of Jeff Halper, the president of the Israel Committee Against Home Demolitions and Lauren Booth, a relative of Tony Blair. A dozen European parliamentarians are there, including a former member of the Blair administration. They have feasted at the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s palace. They have received 240,000 Euros in donations to buy a classy yacht named dignity. But there will not be a cent for Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier abducted by Hamas in June of 2006. Not one of the European parliamentarians will attempt to meet with Gilad. Neither will the Israeli ‘activists’ and ‘journalists’ such as Amira Hass. Instead they will add their support to Islamism, to religious extremism and to hatred and intolerance. Why is it like this? Why do ‘human rights activists’ so rarely work to actually provide humans with rights? Why are extreme leftist Europeans so often callous towards the lives of Jews?
The history behind the ‘free Gaza’ movement and its well funded campaign from Europe is a history of shame. It is a history that goes back to the Red Cross and its involvement in the Second World War. During the Second World War the precursor of modern human rights movements, the Red Cross, was called upon to deliver letters and food packages to Jews and POWs held by the Nazi regime. It was also called upon to report on the condition of the concentration camps. However the Red Cross actually worked to help gloss over Nazi crimes by only showing the positive side of Nazism, by working with Nazi minders and touring the ‘model camp’ of Thereisenstadt. The Red Cross thus worked to excuse Nazi crimes and did not request access to other Nazi camps or their Jewish inmates. The shame of the Red Cross’s involvement does not end there. When the Nazis abandoned Thereseinstadt on April 22nd they handed the keys to the gate over to the Red Cross. The Red Cross ran the camp until it was liberated on May 8th by the Red Army. This means that the Jews of Theresienstadt were not liberated from the Nazis but actually had to be liberated from the clutches of the Red Cross, which refused them permission to leave the camp.
Today the Red Cross operates freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It provides medical care and services only to Palestinians. It does not provide any assistance to Jews and has rarely documented human rights violations against Jews in Israel. In Gaza the Red Cross does not work to provide care packages to Gilad or letters to him from his family. The descendants of the Red Cross, modern day ‘human rights’ organizations also do not provide any assistance to Gilad or his family and they neither protest on his behalf nor do they demand the right to see him when their members are in Gaza. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch do not provide reports documenting his detention. This is all the more shameful in Amnesty’s case because it has worked throughout the world to provide support for political prisoners and those illegally held by governments or terrorist movements, such as the FARC in Columbia.
There is a deep sadness in seeing European parliamentarians waving Palestinian flags and smiling from a posh yacht on their way back and forth from Gaza. It is disturbing to know that no European chartered such boats to save the Jewish refugees trying in vain to flee Europe in 1939. There was not one cent for those Jews just as there is not one cent for Gilad today. Every European donor to the free Gaza movement should be ashamed. While the residents of Gaza deserve a better life there is no excuse that time and again Jews are denied even the most basic human rights from human rights organizations and that callous human rights activists can walk on the soil of Gaza, over the very head of Gilad’s prison, and not request to see him.
Terra Incognita 61 The Obama issue
Terra Incognita
Issue 61
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
The Obama issue
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 16th, 2008
1) Liberalism: "Americans discriminate against Obama because he is black, so let's vote for him because he is black." One of the odd things to come out of the 2008 election is the claim that people wouldn’t vote for Obama because he was black and thus the odd claim that he needed to be supported because he was black.
2) How much hate does the Obama victory engender?: One of the outcomes of the election of Obama was an avalanche of hate directed against those who refused to be taken in by the idea that “if you don’t vote for him you are racist and not progressive.” So now those seen as ‘behind the times’ are being told they are the embodiment of evil, with all sorts of insults and slander being heaped upon them.
3) Cheering for nothing: lies about Obama at home and abroad: One cartoon that appeared after the Obama victory showed a black man hugging a white man in the U.S and foreigner cheering that “Yes they can.” This implies that America is some sort of ‘behind the times’ racist place that has finally caught up with the world. Its odd, because we don’t see Christians running Muslim countries or Muslims being elected to run European countries. Who are they to cheer for us Americans? The world should examine its own soul and its own failings for it is more of a racist cesspool than America. Its time for the world to stop living vicariously through the U.S, blaming it for its problems and then celebrating for it as if the world is America. It is not.
4) Where are the world’s Obamas: More stupidity: Now people in the world are saying “where is our Obama?” Israelis are saying they need an Arab prime minister and the French are trying to find an ‘Obama’. This racist idiocy that believes a country is better off just because it has someone different at the helm is tragic. Should Leon Blum have been judged based solely on his being Jewish and not on his socialist ways? Should Indira be judged based solely on being a woman and not on Operation Blue Star? Judge people based solely on one quality and one then finds they may very well be blamed for that one quality.
Liberalism: "Americans discriminate against Obama because he is black, so let's vote for him because he is black."
November 2nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
As if to tell us, 'thank god, Jesus has come to cleanse the temple', our media is telling us that this is the most important U.S election of our lifetime; "this 2008 election is a milestone that may put a black man in the White House." And yet, oddly, at the same time we are being served odd tripe alongside this dish. The media tells us that the election shouldn't be about race. Then it tells us that Obama would be leading by more points if it weren't for the racism of Americans. Senators Murtha and Biden both tell us that 'Americans are having a hard time voting for a black man.' And now we learn that in fact it is our 'subconscious' racism that is keeping Obama down. This is how the race scam works in the United States. We are presented with a candidate. We are told he is black. Then we are told that if we vote against him we are racist and even if there is no evidence for that racism we are told that we are 'subconsciously racist' and then when that doesn't work we are told that we can participate in a 'milestone' event by putting a 'black man' in the white house. This rubric of racism, whereby we are first told we are racist, then convinced that we are 'subconsciously' racist and then told to like something merely because of its racist, thus making us racist even if we weren't in the first place, is part of the great lie that is 'lets talk about race.'
That was the title of Nicholas Kristof's piece in the New York Times on October 30th, 2008. Kristof tells us that a recent study by Harvard's Project Implicit showed that "the mind balked at accepting a black candidate as fully American…[which shows] the gulf between out conscious ideals of equality and our unconscious proclivity to discriminate…[We] associate the idea of 'American' with white skin." One might accept that there is some truth to some of this. But Kristof takes the reader one stop further, exhorting us about how the "2008 election is a milestone that may put a black man in the white house." Kristof is subconsciously telling us something as well. He is telling us that we are all secret racists and to make up for our racism we must vote for Obama, not because Obama is a great candidate, but because he is a "black man" and we need to make this year a "milestone."
Where is all the evidence for this 'secret' racism and this unconscious racism that is keeping Obama's poll numbers down and keeping people from voting for him, because as Joe Biden reminds us "a difficult time just culturally making the change, making the move for the first African American president in the history of the United States of America." Are we kidding ourselves? What poll numbers and media attention and support does Obama need in order for us to prove that we are not all 'unconscious' racists? Does he need 90% of the vote? Is it enough that only 70% of NBC media coverage of him is positive or does it have to 95%?
It seems the constant claim that 'unconscious' racism is keeping Obama down and that we are having "trouble" electing a black candidate is designed to make us non-racists feel bad about ourselves and vote for Obama merely because of his race in order to prove that we are not racist. This is a brilliant tactic on the part of those, like Biden, Murtha and Kristof, who peddle it. But it is also a very low political tactic and it is, ironically, racist. There is nothing more racist than selecting a candidate because of his race. There is nothing that does less justice to the cause of equality and to African-Americans than voting for a man because of the color of his skin rather than the content of his character.
How much hate does the Obama victory engender?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 10th, 2008
One of the odd dividends of the Obama victory has been the hate being dished out against those, like myself, who did not vote for this new Jesus. It began with the pre-election idiocy dished out by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times, accusing everyone who didn’t vote for the new Kennedy of being ‘secret’ racists. Then after the election Paul Krugman of the Times proclaimed that the “Republican Rump” had become the “party of intolerance.” Then Orna Coussins, evidently another extremist oped writer, in Haaretz, declared “the era of the conservative white male is over.” She claimed that “one could argue of course that the long, continuous struggle against him has not been completed yet… He has not disappeared. He still makes his voice heard - a somewhat strident voice - in newspapers, on the op-ed pages.. When he can, he still tries to deride women, or blacks, or his critics, regardless of religion, color and gender… For hundreds of years he ruled unthreatened. He had slaves - people without freedom, to fulfill his needs, manufacture his products and carry out his menial work. For hundreds of years he felt comfortable. He kept women - denied of their freedom - to take care of his sexual and feeding needs, and to raise his offspring.” Hey, sister, I’m still here and the ‘death’ of the old white conservative male is a myth, behind the conservatives whites of the U.S are conservative blacks and Hispanics and Indians and Asians. And in the end conservative Islam, which is run by white Arabs, will crush liberalism in a way conservatives never dreamed of, to an extent and in a manner that will make leftists like Coussins scream for mercy and wish the old style ‘conservative’ like Goldwater would return. The leftist who plunges a dagger into our erstwhile democratic conservatism will find it has the same affect as those Communists who plunged the dagger into Hindenberg’s conservative Wiemer administration, heralding the era of Nazism.
But the odd gloating and baseness never ends. Paul Krugman writes again on November 9th that “if you’re an American and the election of the first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary eyed…there’s something wrong with you.” Teary eyed? Is that what we are supposed to be? Just over some skin color? Is that all we are to be measured by? That’s the tragedy of liberalism, in its obsession with multi-culturaism, it cannot see beyond race and judges solely on this fact, which is disturbing. Did they get teary eyed when Condi rice was our National Security Advisor or Coin Powel was our Secretary of State or when, in 1866, the first black American, a genuine former slave, was elected to the Senate. I guess we weren’t tear eyed back then when Senator Bruce took his oath. But that may have been because we judged better back then. And yes, we were Republicans back then. And yes, some of us were white, male and conservative.
Leftists condemn us at their peril. They support candidates based on the color of skin and weep for no reason. It is precisely because liberals support Obama based on skin color that they have decided those who didn’t support him were ‘racists’. How funny to see how racism actually works.
Cheering for nothing: lies about Obama at home and abroad
November 6th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Every newspaper and media outlet is on about it: "nation elects first black president." It is as if one should be proud just to have a change of skin color in the white house (something long predicted in Hollywood movies from Dave Chapelle's comedy to 24 to Morgan Freeman as President in Deep Impact. When asked how he felt playing the first black president he said "I'm not playing the first black president, I'm playing a president who happens to be black." Thank you Mr. Freeman.) , as if that were all it is, as if a man or woman is nothing but his skin color. Truly this is the most base act of man, the most base instinct and savage judgment, the lie that permeates all of our liberal presumptions about people. It is the lie of race. It is the greatest lie, made even more of a lie in the case of Obama, because he is not connected, culturally, ethnically or historically, to the heritage and history of Black Americans. But that is all the more great for him, for we can say that his path is more interesting. But it is not the same path that Mr. Jesse Jackson or David Dinkins represented. And yet we are deceived because we see that skin color and pat ourselves on the back and say "I am good today, we are good today, we overcame racial divides and we did it, we expelled the sins of our past, we have elected a black man." You see it in the smiles and adoration of the public, the semi-orgasmic displays of raunchy cheering and excitable youth, the people that are happy because they feel they have done something good, that by voting they took part in a 'civil rights struggle'. That is good for them perhaps. It is good for Americans, especially leftists, to feel good about themselves. Even rightists it seems are overtaken, Brit Hume and the rest of the hard men and women of Fox News were all over emotion. "We did it."
I am happy for Mr. Obama. His energy is a positive thing. His blank slate, the fact that we know nothing about his policies, thoughts or beliefs, may bode ill or good. After all, untested young men have achieved great things, lest we forget Henry V or Alexander the Great. Obama is, of course, first an American and he embodies many things about America, the least of which is his skin color and the phony obsession with it. At his worst we must say of him, as John Gotti said of Paul 'Big Pauly' Castellano; "we got the boss we got." But the greatest lie concerning Mr. Obama is not the lie being told at home, it is the lie being told abroad.
Zvi Barel wrote in Haaretz on November 4th in an article entitled 'Arab Commentators want to be able to admire America again' about how the Arabs feel about Obama. Hamad al Majid wrote in Asharq al-Awsat in London that the election of Obama is a positive thing because "it will put an end to the white man's monopoly on the White House." Lets pause for a moment and reflect on this statement. An Arab is celebrating the fact that the white man's monopoly is ending in the U.S. But what race is the Arab? He is not black and in this base world if one is not black or Asian they are white. Do Arab nations elect black leaders? Egypt had Sadat and he was murdered. In Sudan they simply genocide the blacks, such is their admiration for them. In Saudi they still import blacks as slaves. In fact the Arab world is full of racism towards blacks who are referred to variously as 'Abd' (slave) or as 'Kaffir' (infidel). In places where there are concentrations of formerly enslaves blacks, such as in the Bedouin village of Rahat in Israel or in southern Iran, southern Morocco, Niger, Mauritania, Sudan, northern Egypt or Somalia we find that those blacks are subjected to rape, genocide, assaults, harassment, discrimination, verbal abuse, enslavement and suppression. We might say its 'like the Old South'. The irony that Arabs cheer for Obama because he is black would be as ironic as Apartheid South Africa cheering had Jesse Jackson won when he ran for president.
But the lies and hypocrisy doesn't end with the white Arabs. As revealed previously a survey taken in Europe showed that while Europeans wanted America to have a minority as president (and the word 'minority' is probably a fairer and more accurate description of Obama than to call him either 'Black' or 'African-American'). But those same Europeans didn't want a minority running their country. This hypocrisy of the European and the Arab and others is illustrated no better than in the cartoon that appeared in the New York Times on November 6th, 2008. It shows a white man hugging a black man in the U.S. The black man is weeping. And standing outside the U.S are five figures seeming to represent Europe, the Arab world, Asia and Africa. The five figures are cheering "Yes they could!"
The insinuation is that America is some bastard child of the world, a place of racial divisions and hatred and discrimination where the people cannot see past race. They are cheering for us? As if we need their approval? Are we kidding ourselves. Lets just recall a few things about America. Was it Europeans who fought wars to end slavery. No. Was it Arabs? No. Was it Asians? No. Was it Africans? No. It was Americans. We are the only nation to have fought a war to end the institution of slavery. That is no mere thing. We only fought a war to end it because it was an institution never practiced in half of the country. But while the U.S outlawed slavery in 1863 it seems that slavery still continues in parts of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. They cheer for us? What of the other minorities? When the Irish were starving from the Potato famine did they not come in the hundreds of thousands to the shores of United States? When the Jews were called up for 30 years of brutal service in the Tsarist army where they were raped of their religion was it not the U.S that granted them entry? In fact it was the U.S that granted all the unwanted Europeans entry. And yet today they cheer for us? Is it because we took their "tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free." We took them all. Asians, Hispanics, Africans of every tribe, Cubans, Haitians (a country of freed slaves that the U.S was the first to recognize by the way) , Germans. We took them. And now their former oppressors cheer for us? We turned these poor huddled masses into strong men and we sent them back to their former lands to defeat the scourges of their past. We sent them back in legions upon legions of men to defeat Nazism and Communism and all the other brands of evil that the world has conjured up. But it has not stopped. The genocides continue, recently in Rwanda, and in Darfur. The cleansing of minorities continues and is covered up. And yet they cheer for us?
I am suspicious of a savage world that cheers for us. We do not cheer for them. We never cheer because we know what the world is capable of. We Americans have not seeked the approval of the world ever and it is unfortunate that we do now. We have done things on our own time and usually before the world has done them. We have ended slavery with our own strength, not because some European asked us to. We have granted rights to women and given men without property the vote. We have had our Bill of Rights and our right to guns and our abortion rights. All absent of the world telling us how to do it. And they cheer for us? It is like the man who is in the sewer cheering for the man who has already pulled himself out. We are out of the cesspool. But the world is still in it. The world lives vicariously through the U.S. If it makes them happy that is great. But they shouldn’t kid themselves that they are like us. White genocidal Arabs shouldn’t pretend that they are really cheering for the 'black man'. It’s the same black man who they support the murder of in the Sudan. And his children are just old enough to be stoned alive in Somalia. So don't cheer for us. Look into your own soul and ask yourself why you are so happy. Is it not because you, as a world, have failed so miserably and that we Americans have always done so much better? So we have Obama. We have the boss we got. Who do you have?
Where are the world’s Obamas: More stupidity
Seth J. Frantzman
November 15th, 2008
Hatred, idiocy, and other myths were not the only thing engendered by the Obama victory. Now the newspapers are asking throughout the world ‘where is our Obama’. The week of November 8-15th saw the headline in the New York Times ‘Where is Europe’s Obama.’ Bradley Burston wrote in Haaretz that He desires to see an Arab elected the prime minister of Israel so that Israel will have its ‘Obama.’ There is something deeply foolish in all this. People are simply unable to judge this election beyond skin color. They believe that France needs a black president now, regardless of his policies. It is as stupid as judging former French president’s Leon Blum and Mendes-France based on the fact that they were Jews. But were they any good? One was a socialist and perhaps his social programs were more influential or damning than his Jewishness? No. That couldn’t be. Its enough that he was Jew in a nation of gentiles. An inability to see past his Jewishness means that he must be judged solely on that, on the idea that the ‘Other’ is positive based solely on his being the ‘other’, regardless of his politics. Is it enough to judge Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi on being women, or on their ordering Operation Blue Star and waging the Yom Kippur war in a semi-disastrous manner? But they were women. That’s enough. Can we judge between Elizabeth and Victoria, or must we seem them as the same, women, regardless of Elizabeth’s role in fighting for the Anglican church and repelling the Spanish Armada? Judge them only as women and we cannot see their failures and their greatness.
The oddity of this is that Europe has had the ‘other’ in power. Holland had its Ayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali born women turned women’s rights activist and fighter against Islamism. But she was run out of the country, first by death threats and then threats to deport her. England has its Lord Ahmed. It had its Disreali. It had its Stanley Baldwin, a man distinguished not by his skin color but his average workaday demeanor and humble nature. Russia has had its Obamas. It had Stalin, a Georgian, and a whole host of other foreigners and non-Russians, running the country during Soviet times, from Khruschev to Beria and Mikoyan, not to mention all the Jews such as Kamanev, Zinoviev and Trotsky. Should they be judged on their ethnicity alone? If so then the Jews certainly come off badly for their role in Communism, a link often made by Nazism and even by Churchill. Judge them on something more than skin and we might see more nuance. But in our world we can only judge on skin color, an odd byproduct of leftist run wild whereby in order to make up for the racism of the past we do the opposite, we become positive racists, judging people positively for being an other. Colleges in the U.S often reward points for certain things, such as being a ‘legacy’ or from some minority or some region. But that has overflowed into society as a whole. Now any old ‘other’, especially if he comes from one of the romantic ‘others’, will do. This is a dangerous savagization of society, a return to the base instincts of the tribe, except that the instinct is now reversed, instead of suspecting the ‘other’ we love him more. The men of the hill country of Appalachia would not be impressed. In the 17th century their songs, idioms and poems mostly justified hatred of the stranger: “Put the stranger near the danger” and “All bad and no good on the back of a stranger.” The New York Times has relegated Appalachia and the South now to being ‘out of touch’ because these were some of the few districts that went more Republican in 2008, apparently because they are backward and racist. The Times celebrates the end of the appearance of “southern accents” in the halls of Washington. People celebrated this fact in 1865, and it was so for many decades. But the South and the hill country have an odd way of returning to America from time to time. Maybe they judged Mr. Obama on being a stranger, as Republican Saxby Chambliss supposedly said something along the lines of “look the other folks are voting.” But such are the dangers of racism. Define a man by his race and one finds that one gets both ends of the stick, those who hate him based on his race and those who love him based on his race. Is that truly such an accomplishment for society? So does the world need its Obamas? Not if it just means that we get a change of color and religion in some places. It is society itself that needs reforming, the extreme-secular liberalism of Europe and the Islamism found elsewhere. Changing the color of the president may not be enough unless the ‘change’ embodied in the color will help the world role back immorality and terrorism.
Issue 61
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
The Obama issue
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 16th, 2008
1) Liberalism: "Americans discriminate against Obama because he is black, so let's vote for him because he is black." One of the odd things to come out of the 2008 election is the claim that people wouldn’t vote for Obama because he was black and thus the odd claim that he needed to be supported because he was black.
2) How much hate does the Obama victory engender?: One of the outcomes of the election of Obama was an avalanche of hate directed against those who refused to be taken in by the idea that “if you don’t vote for him you are racist and not progressive.” So now those seen as ‘behind the times’ are being told they are the embodiment of evil, with all sorts of insults and slander being heaped upon them.
3) Cheering for nothing: lies about Obama at home and abroad: One cartoon that appeared after the Obama victory showed a black man hugging a white man in the U.S and foreigner cheering that “Yes they can.” This implies that America is some sort of ‘behind the times’ racist place that has finally caught up with the world. Its odd, because we don’t see Christians running Muslim countries or Muslims being elected to run European countries. Who are they to cheer for us Americans? The world should examine its own soul and its own failings for it is more of a racist cesspool than America. Its time for the world to stop living vicariously through the U.S, blaming it for its problems and then celebrating for it as if the world is America. It is not.
4) Where are the world’s Obamas: More stupidity: Now people in the world are saying “where is our Obama?” Israelis are saying they need an Arab prime minister and the French are trying to find an ‘Obama’. This racist idiocy that believes a country is better off just because it has someone different at the helm is tragic. Should Leon Blum have been judged based solely on his being Jewish and not on his socialist ways? Should Indira be judged based solely on being a woman and not on Operation Blue Star? Judge people based solely on one quality and one then finds they may very well be blamed for that one quality.
Liberalism: "Americans discriminate against Obama because he is black, so let's vote for him because he is black."
November 2nd, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
As if to tell us, 'thank god, Jesus has come to cleanse the temple', our media is telling us that this is the most important U.S election of our lifetime; "this 2008 election is a milestone that may put a black man in the White House." And yet, oddly, at the same time we are being served odd tripe alongside this dish. The media tells us that the election shouldn't be about race. Then it tells us that Obama would be leading by more points if it weren't for the racism of Americans. Senators Murtha and Biden both tell us that 'Americans are having a hard time voting for a black man.' And now we learn that in fact it is our 'subconscious' racism that is keeping Obama down. This is how the race scam works in the United States. We are presented with a candidate. We are told he is black. Then we are told that if we vote against him we are racist and even if there is no evidence for that racism we are told that we are 'subconsciously racist' and then when that doesn't work we are told that we can participate in a 'milestone' event by putting a 'black man' in the white house. This rubric of racism, whereby we are first told we are racist, then convinced that we are 'subconsciously' racist and then told to like something merely because of its racist, thus making us racist even if we weren't in the first place, is part of the great lie that is 'lets talk about race.'
That was the title of Nicholas Kristof's piece in the New York Times on October 30th, 2008. Kristof tells us that a recent study by Harvard's Project Implicit showed that "the mind balked at accepting a black candidate as fully American…[which shows] the gulf between out conscious ideals of equality and our unconscious proclivity to discriminate…[We] associate the idea of 'American' with white skin." One might accept that there is some truth to some of this. But Kristof takes the reader one stop further, exhorting us about how the "2008 election is a milestone that may put a black man in the white house." Kristof is subconsciously telling us something as well. He is telling us that we are all secret racists and to make up for our racism we must vote for Obama, not because Obama is a great candidate, but because he is a "black man" and we need to make this year a "milestone."
Where is all the evidence for this 'secret' racism and this unconscious racism that is keeping Obama's poll numbers down and keeping people from voting for him, because as Joe Biden reminds us "a difficult time just culturally making the change, making the move for the first African American president in the history of the United States of America." Are we kidding ourselves? What poll numbers and media attention and support does Obama need in order for us to prove that we are not all 'unconscious' racists? Does he need 90% of the vote? Is it enough that only 70% of NBC media coverage of him is positive or does it have to 95%?
It seems the constant claim that 'unconscious' racism is keeping Obama down and that we are having "trouble" electing a black candidate is designed to make us non-racists feel bad about ourselves and vote for Obama merely because of his race in order to prove that we are not racist. This is a brilliant tactic on the part of those, like Biden, Murtha and Kristof, who peddle it. But it is also a very low political tactic and it is, ironically, racist. There is nothing more racist than selecting a candidate because of his race. There is nothing that does less justice to the cause of equality and to African-Americans than voting for a man because of the color of his skin rather than the content of his character.
How much hate does the Obama victory engender?
Seth J. Frantzman
November 10th, 2008
One of the odd dividends of the Obama victory has been the hate being dished out against those, like myself, who did not vote for this new Jesus. It began with the pre-election idiocy dished out by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times, accusing everyone who didn’t vote for the new Kennedy of being ‘secret’ racists. Then after the election Paul Krugman of the Times proclaimed that the “Republican Rump” had become the “party of intolerance.” Then Orna Coussins, evidently another extremist oped writer, in Haaretz, declared “the era of the conservative white male is over.” She claimed that “one could argue of course that the long, continuous struggle against him has not been completed yet… He has not disappeared. He still makes his voice heard - a somewhat strident voice - in newspapers, on the op-ed pages.. When he can, he still tries to deride women, or blacks, or his critics, regardless of religion, color and gender… For hundreds of years he ruled unthreatened. He had slaves - people without freedom, to fulfill his needs, manufacture his products and carry out his menial work. For hundreds of years he felt comfortable. He kept women - denied of their freedom - to take care of his sexual and feeding needs, and to raise his offspring.” Hey, sister, I’m still here and the ‘death’ of the old white conservative male is a myth, behind the conservatives whites of the U.S are conservative blacks and Hispanics and Indians and Asians. And in the end conservative Islam, which is run by white Arabs, will crush liberalism in a way conservatives never dreamed of, to an extent and in a manner that will make leftists like Coussins scream for mercy and wish the old style ‘conservative’ like Goldwater would return. The leftist who plunges a dagger into our erstwhile democratic conservatism will find it has the same affect as those Communists who plunged the dagger into Hindenberg’s conservative Wiemer administration, heralding the era of Nazism.
But the odd gloating and baseness never ends. Paul Krugman writes again on November 9th that “if you’re an American and the election of the first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary eyed…there’s something wrong with you.” Teary eyed? Is that what we are supposed to be? Just over some skin color? Is that all we are to be measured by? That’s the tragedy of liberalism, in its obsession with multi-culturaism, it cannot see beyond race and judges solely on this fact, which is disturbing. Did they get teary eyed when Condi rice was our National Security Advisor or Coin Powel was our Secretary of State or when, in 1866, the first black American, a genuine former slave, was elected to the Senate. I guess we weren’t tear eyed back then when Senator Bruce took his oath. But that may have been because we judged better back then. And yes, we were Republicans back then. And yes, some of us were white, male and conservative.
Leftists condemn us at their peril. They support candidates based on the color of skin and weep for no reason. It is precisely because liberals support Obama based on skin color that they have decided those who didn’t support him were ‘racists’. How funny to see how racism actually works.
Cheering for nothing: lies about Obama at home and abroad
November 6th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Every newspaper and media outlet is on about it: "nation elects first black president." It is as if one should be proud just to have a change of skin color in the white house (something long predicted in Hollywood movies from Dave Chapelle's comedy to 24 to Morgan Freeman as President in Deep Impact. When asked how he felt playing the first black president he said "I'm not playing the first black president, I'm playing a president who happens to be black." Thank you Mr. Freeman.) , as if that were all it is, as if a man or woman is nothing but his skin color. Truly this is the most base act of man, the most base instinct and savage judgment, the lie that permeates all of our liberal presumptions about people. It is the lie of race. It is the greatest lie, made even more of a lie in the case of Obama, because he is not connected, culturally, ethnically or historically, to the heritage and history of Black Americans. But that is all the more great for him, for we can say that his path is more interesting. But it is not the same path that Mr. Jesse Jackson or David Dinkins represented. And yet we are deceived because we see that skin color and pat ourselves on the back and say "I am good today, we are good today, we overcame racial divides and we did it, we expelled the sins of our past, we have elected a black man." You see it in the smiles and adoration of the public, the semi-orgasmic displays of raunchy cheering and excitable youth, the people that are happy because they feel they have done something good, that by voting they took part in a 'civil rights struggle'. That is good for them perhaps. It is good for Americans, especially leftists, to feel good about themselves. Even rightists it seems are overtaken, Brit Hume and the rest of the hard men and women of Fox News were all over emotion. "We did it."
I am happy for Mr. Obama. His energy is a positive thing. His blank slate, the fact that we know nothing about his policies, thoughts or beliefs, may bode ill or good. After all, untested young men have achieved great things, lest we forget Henry V or Alexander the Great. Obama is, of course, first an American and he embodies many things about America, the least of which is his skin color and the phony obsession with it. At his worst we must say of him, as John Gotti said of Paul 'Big Pauly' Castellano; "we got the boss we got." But the greatest lie concerning Mr. Obama is not the lie being told at home, it is the lie being told abroad.
Zvi Barel wrote in Haaretz on November 4th in an article entitled 'Arab Commentators want to be able to admire America again' about how the Arabs feel about Obama. Hamad al Majid wrote in Asharq al-Awsat in London that the election of Obama is a positive thing because "it will put an end to the white man's monopoly on the White House." Lets pause for a moment and reflect on this statement. An Arab is celebrating the fact that the white man's monopoly is ending in the U.S. But what race is the Arab? He is not black and in this base world if one is not black or Asian they are white. Do Arab nations elect black leaders? Egypt had Sadat and he was murdered. In Sudan they simply genocide the blacks, such is their admiration for them. In Saudi they still import blacks as slaves. In fact the Arab world is full of racism towards blacks who are referred to variously as 'Abd' (slave) or as 'Kaffir' (infidel). In places where there are concentrations of formerly enslaves blacks, such as in the Bedouin village of Rahat in Israel or in southern Iran, southern Morocco, Niger, Mauritania, Sudan, northern Egypt or Somalia we find that those blacks are subjected to rape, genocide, assaults, harassment, discrimination, verbal abuse, enslavement and suppression. We might say its 'like the Old South'. The irony that Arabs cheer for Obama because he is black would be as ironic as Apartheid South Africa cheering had Jesse Jackson won when he ran for president.
But the lies and hypocrisy doesn't end with the white Arabs. As revealed previously a survey taken in Europe showed that while Europeans wanted America to have a minority as president (and the word 'minority' is probably a fairer and more accurate description of Obama than to call him either 'Black' or 'African-American'). But those same Europeans didn't want a minority running their country. This hypocrisy of the European and the Arab and others is illustrated no better than in the cartoon that appeared in the New York Times on November 6th, 2008. It shows a white man hugging a black man in the U.S. The black man is weeping. And standing outside the U.S are five figures seeming to represent Europe, the Arab world, Asia and Africa. The five figures are cheering "Yes they could!"
The insinuation is that America is some bastard child of the world, a place of racial divisions and hatred and discrimination where the people cannot see past race. They are cheering for us? As if we need their approval? Are we kidding ourselves. Lets just recall a few things about America. Was it Europeans who fought wars to end slavery. No. Was it Arabs? No. Was it Asians? No. Was it Africans? No. It was Americans. We are the only nation to have fought a war to end the institution of slavery. That is no mere thing. We only fought a war to end it because it was an institution never practiced in half of the country. But while the U.S outlawed slavery in 1863 it seems that slavery still continues in parts of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. They cheer for us? What of the other minorities? When the Irish were starving from the Potato famine did they not come in the hundreds of thousands to the shores of United States? When the Jews were called up for 30 years of brutal service in the Tsarist army where they were raped of their religion was it not the U.S that granted them entry? In fact it was the U.S that granted all the unwanted Europeans entry. And yet today they cheer for us? Is it because we took their "tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free." We took them all. Asians, Hispanics, Africans of every tribe, Cubans, Haitians (a country of freed slaves that the U.S was the first to recognize by the way) , Germans. We took them. And now their former oppressors cheer for us? We turned these poor huddled masses into strong men and we sent them back to their former lands to defeat the scourges of their past. We sent them back in legions upon legions of men to defeat Nazism and Communism and all the other brands of evil that the world has conjured up. But it has not stopped. The genocides continue, recently in Rwanda, and in Darfur. The cleansing of minorities continues and is covered up. And yet they cheer for us?
I am suspicious of a savage world that cheers for us. We do not cheer for them. We never cheer because we know what the world is capable of. We Americans have not seeked the approval of the world ever and it is unfortunate that we do now. We have done things on our own time and usually before the world has done them. We have ended slavery with our own strength, not because some European asked us to. We have granted rights to women and given men without property the vote. We have had our Bill of Rights and our right to guns and our abortion rights. All absent of the world telling us how to do it. And they cheer for us? It is like the man who is in the sewer cheering for the man who has already pulled himself out. We are out of the cesspool. But the world is still in it. The world lives vicariously through the U.S. If it makes them happy that is great. But they shouldn’t kid themselves that they are like us. White genocidal Arabs shouldn’t pretend that they are really cheering for the 'black man'. It’s the same black man who they support the murder of in the Sudan. And his children are just old enough to be stoned alive in Somalia. So don't cheer for us. Look into your own soul and ask yourself why you are so happy. Is it not because you, as a world, have failed so miserably and that we Americans have always done so much better? So we have Obama. We have the boss we got. Who do you have?
Where are the world’s Obamas: More stupidity
Seth J. Frantzman
November 15th, 2008
Hatred, idiocy, and other myths were not the only thing engendered by the Obama victory. Now the newspapers are asking throughout the world ‘where is our Obama’. The week of November 8-15th saw the headline in the New York Times ‘Where is Europe’s Obama.’ Bradley Burston wrote in Haaretz that He desires to see an Arab elected the prime minister of Israel so that Israel will have its ‘Obama.’ There is something deeply foolish in all this. People are simply unable to judge this election beyond skin color. They believe that France needs a black president now, regardless of his policies. It is as stupid as judging former French president’s Leon Blum and Mendes-France based on the fact that they were Jews. But were they any good? One was a socialist and perhaps his social programs were more influential or damning than his Jewishness? No. That couldn’t be. Its enough that he was Jew in a nation of gentiles. An inability to see past his Jewishness means that he must be judged solely on that, on the idea that the ‘Other’ is positive based solely on his being the ‘other’, regardless of his politics. Is it enough to judge Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi on being women, or on their ordering Operation Blue Star and waging the Yom Kippur war in a semi-disastrous manner? But they were women. That’s enough. Can we judge between Elizabeth and Victoria, or must we seem them as the same, women, regardless of Elizabeth’s role in fighting for the Anglican church and repelling the Spanish Armada? Judge them only as women and we cannot see their failures and their greatness.
The oddity of this is that Europe has had the ‘other’ in power. Holland had its Ayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali born women turned women’s rights activist and fighter against Islamism. But she was run out of the country, first by death threats and then threats to deport her. England has its Lord Ahmed. It had its Disreali. It had its Stanley Baldwin, a man distinguished not by his skin color but his average workaday demeanor and humble nature. Russia has had its Obamas. It had Stalin, a Georgian, and a whole host of other foreigners and non-Russians, running the country during Soviet times, from Khruschev to Beria and Mikoyan, not to mention all the Jews such as Kamanev, Zinoviev and Trotsky. Should they be judged on their ethnicity alone? If so then the Jews certainly come off badly for their role in Communism, a link often made by Nazism and even by Churchill. Judge them on something more than skin and we might see more nuance. But in our world we can only judge on skin color, an odd byproduct of leftist run wild whereby in order to make up for the racism of the past we do the opposite, we become positive racists, judging people positively for being an other. Colleges in the U.S often reward points for certain things, such as being a ‘legacy’ or from some minority or some region. But that has overflowed into society as a whole. Now any old ‘other’, especially if he comes from one of the romantic ‘others’, will do. This is a dangerous savagization of society, a return to the base instincts of the tribe, except that the instinct is now reversed, instead of suspecting the ‘other’ we love him more. The men of the hill country of Appalachia would not be impressed. In the 17th century their songs, idioms and poems mostly justified hatred of the stranger: “Put the stranger near the danger” and “All bad and no good on the back of a stranger.” The New York Times has relegated Appalachia and the South now to being ‘out of touch’ because these were some of the few districts that went more Republican in 2008, apparently because they are backward and racist. The Times celebrates the end of the appearance of “southern accents” in the halls of Washington. People celebrated this fact in 1865, and it was so for many decades. But the South and the hill country have an odd way of returning to America from time to time. Maybe they judged Mr. Obama on being a stranger, as Republican Saxby Chambliss supposedly said something along the lines of “look the other folks are voting.” But such are the dangers of racism. Define a man by his race and one finds that one gets both ends of the stick, those who hate him based on his race and those who love him based on his race. Is that truly such an accomplishment for society? So does the world need its Obamas? Not if it just means that we get a change of color and religion in some places. It is society itself that needs reforming, the extreme-secular liberalism of Europe and the Islamism found elsewhere. Changing the color of the president may not be enough unless the ‘change’ embodied in the color will help the world role back immorality and terrorism.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Terra Incognita 60 stoning in Somalia, guns and Avraham Burg
Terra Incognita
Issue 60
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 10th, 2008
1) Could we imagine such a world: If we didn’t live in this world could we imagine it? Could we imagine that people travel from one country to another, live in that country and enjoy its benefits and then blow up a bus in that country murder people they have never met and who never did anything to them? Could we imagine a society when women are bought and sold as chattel? I doubt we could imagine the horrors this world produces and for that reason we should question how ‘progressive’ our society is and what, if any, benefits all our liberalism and democracy has brought us.
2) The world will never know her name: (dis) honourable killings and the war on women: Whether women live in an Islamic society or a western liberal one they may face the same fate. In a recent case in Somalia a 13 year old girl was placed in a hole up to her neck and stoned to death by ‘brave’ men who claimed she had dishonored them, apparently because three of them had been ‘enticed’ to rape her. But in Holland some brothels were recently found to have women who had been forcibly tattooed with the names of their ‘owners’. In Israel a judge sympathized with pimps who beat women who refused to ‘work’ during their periods and declared a women has ‘freedom of movement’ if her pimp takes her to a gynecologist once a month. Such a world. Liberal. Progressive. Democratic. Dictatorship. Islamist. The same. Each is satanic and each destroys the soul of humanity.
3) The importance of gun ownership: Colt handguns declared in their earliest advertising that ‘God made all men, Colt made them equal.’ The danger many see in gun ownership by the common man is that it makes him equal to the most powerful man. It was not always this way. Serfs could rarely bring down a feudal lord wearing armor. Gun ownership is the one thing that restrains government from murdering the citizenry.
4) A review of 'The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes' by Avraham Burg, is published by Palgrave Macmillan: Avraham Burg profited from claiming to be a Zionist. He was a head of the Jewish Agency and respected member of the Knesset. Now he claims the Holocaust is an ‘industry’ and that the Jews must set the Germans free from their guilt. Yet he also claims Israel is akin to the Weimer Republic, a pre-fascist state. The Golan is Israel’s ‘Anschluss.’ Burg believes Israel should be part of Europe and that Europe should become Islamic. In light of Bradley Burston declaring “this year this Jew is embracing Jihad” perhaps we should not be surprised. But Burg’s psychological breakdown must be examined in light of his German Jewish heritage. Can he really tell us that the Israel is ‘European’ when a majority of its Jews are not from Europe. Can he tell us it ‘uses’ the Holocaust when a majority of the Jews in Israel have nothing to do with Europe and Europe’s Nazi history. Burg’s outburst represents the last German-Jewish-Israeli-Ashkenazi-elite’s assault on Israel and must be seen in that context.
Could we imagine such a world
November 5th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
If we didn’t live in this world could we imagine it? Let us imagine that we didn’t know this world and let us forget all the things we know about it and imagine that someone came and told a story about such a world. Lets say they told us about a place where women are bought and sold in the backrooms of dank apartments and in restrooms of dirty restaurants. They are placed on display nude and checked for their desirability before being handed over from one man to another for the equivalent of a month’s worth of wages in society. Imagine a place where men from one country and from one religion travel thousands of miles to other lands and plant bombs so as to kill people they have never met and never interacted with and who have never harmed them. Let us imagine a place where those who benefit the most from the rights granted to them by society are the first to condemn that society and demand its destruction, they are the least likely to serve that society but instead demand that poorer people serve that society and die for it so that they can enjoy their freedom to hate the society that begat them. If we learned of such a place, where women are chattel, where people murder others for no reason and where the wealthy and the intellectuals, the most endowed and privileged members of society, hate their own countries, would we want to live in such a world? Would we really choose to live there? Would we think any of it makes any sense. Just think again about this world we have become used to. Think of this thing, terrorism, we have become used to. Think of our society where some members decide, on a whim, to blow up other members of the world for no reason. Think of the Madrid and London bombings and 9/11 and think about how those who carried them out were granted all the freedoms and welfare from those countries and they chose to murder people they had never met and then afterward their acts were described by the media as part of a ‘struggle’ and that they were ‘militants’ with ‘grievances’ and how intellectuals accused those who died of being ‘Eichmans’ and said that there was a ‘myth of the innocent victim’ and then said “revenge solves nothing.” Why would we choose such a society? Who would? If someone said that this society is also a good one because it has ‘democracy’ and it has ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom of speech’ might we question what those things are if they produce things.
We live in such a world and I ask, is such a world truly worth it? I mean is it worth anything? In our world where Islamic law is worshipped and loved in the West, where the Archbishop of Canterbury supports its implication and where we already have Shariah courts allowed to rule in domestic violence cases in the U.K. I ask, is such a world worth anything? And I ask you to consider this story: Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13 year old girl in Somalia was raped by three adult males while on the way to her grandmothers. He took her to the police. They brought her to the Islamic Shariah court which pronounced her guilty of 'adultery’ even though she was not married. She was brought to a football stadium where a 1,000 men gathered to watch her execution. She was led out and she asked of the men "what do you want from me." The grown men said to the 13 year old girl "We will do what Allah has instructed us." She saw then that they intended to kill her and said "I am not going. Don't kill me." They took her to a hole that they had dug in the ground and they buried her up to her neck, making sure the headscarf remained on her head lest her immodesty offend the men. 50 grown men stoned the 13 year old girl's head. They then brought nurses to see if she was dead. The nurses removed her body from the ground and said she was not dead. So they re-buried her and stoned her until she died. Amnesty International representatives and a "human rights activist" and other journalists were on the scene to witness what happened. A Unicef official from the UN was also nearby receiving reports. His name is Christian Balslev-Olesen. I will not use his first name again for he is an insult to that word and it should be stricken from his name. Why do we live in such a godless world? Let us think again about the story. A 13 year old girl. Let us pause. A 13 year old girl. She was raped by 3 grown men. She is accused of being the criminal and murdered by being buried up to her neck so that 50 grown men can stone her. I want to ask again. Why do we live in such a godless world? And think of her last moments. She can see the grown men, the same men that raped her. She can also see the Human Rights Activist. She can see the Unicef workers. She can see the BBC reporters. She can see Christian Balslev-Olesen. I want you to think again of this scene. A 13 year old girl is forced into a hole in the ground so that 50 grown men can stone her head. All the while Europeans stand around and take notes. A human rights activist takes notes. I want you to think again of this. This world. Our world. Is it a place that deserves justice? Is it a place that deserves humanity? Does it deserve anything? It deserves justice. Amnesty International deserves Justice for this. Unicef deserves justice for this. Human rights activists and the reporters present deserve justice for this. Mr. Braslev-Olesen, you deserve justice for this. Islam, that evil thing that destroys this world and takes the soul from humanity, that thing that rapes a 13 year old and then stones her, that thing that requires she be buried up to her neck so that grown men may stone her, Islam deserves justice. Will justice come to these things? No. Braslev-Olesen will return to his Villa in whatever European country he resides. Will someone one day put a knife to his throat and drag him to his back patio and place him in a hole and stone him to death? No. There will be no justice. Do these Muslims, these animals, do they, as they raise a stone over their head to throw at a 13 year old girl, do they have any humanity? Are they human? What kind of a man can do such a thing? In my mind the world is not worth our effort. Humanity is not worth anything. When the world media's representatives and the UN representatives can look on and do nothing, when grown men stone 13 year old girls and call its 'God's will', I cannot say we live in any sort of human society. We live in nothing. Will Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow ever return to us? Will she ever have her justice? It is on our shoulders to wait until Mr. Braslev-Olesen dies and then to seek out his grave and demolish it so that no memory of him remains. The name Braslev-Olesen is a curse on humanity, only slightly less a curse than that thing called Mohammed that was vomited forth in the 7th century. We can do that bit of justice for a 13 year old girl who died at the hands of men while another man sat by. May the UN and Islam be buried up to their necks in the blood they have watched be spilled and may they and this world die the death that both so brilliantly deserve. I can think of no other verdict for such a place. Our own comforts are meaningless if such crimes are committed.
The world will never know her name: (dis) honourable killings and the war on women
November 5th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Hidden on a sidebar on page seven of the International Herald Tribune on November 5th, 2008 was the headline ‘Girl is stoned to death by Islamists in Somalia.’ The United Nations reported that a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men and complained to police was taken by men, placed in a hole, and stoned to death. Under Islamic law she was accused of ‘adultery’, a crime punishable by death. We won’t ever know her name. In her society she may not have even had a name that mattered. She was chattel, less valuable than a mule, a piece of meat to be raped for the pleasure of men and then stoned by those same men for ‘dishonouring’ her family.
Take the recent case where the Tel Aviv District court judge Dalia Ganot freed five suspected human traffickers because, according to the judge, the prostitutes were not “forced into sex…no evidence was brought from which one can infer the existence of supervision or control over the movements of the plaintiffs or the scope of their work.” According to reports “Ganot wrote in her ruling that the two complainants seemed to have freedom of movement, noting that one of the defendants said he took them to the gynecologist and the supermarket, as well as the beach and Superland.” That is freedom of movement for a woman, a human being? If they are taken to a gynecologist once a month to make sure they aren’t pregnant from being forced to have sex with 13 men a day? That is freedom of movement? But Ganot went further, noting that “it is normal for a pimp to be angry if his prostitute refuses to work on her period.” But we don’t even know the womens’ names.
There is also the recent story entitled; ‘Brothels forbid prostitutes to use condoms to prevent evidence.” ‘Massage parlors’ forbid their prostitutes from using condoms. One woman relates that “you work an eight hour shift..they [the owners] are the one’s making the profits while we’re taking risks.” But the owner has the best interests of the men at heart: “the damage a woman carrier can do is horrendous.” While the newspaper and other media investigators never have problems gaining entrance to these places the police seem oblivious.
Or maybe we should think of the story of the Abu Ghanem brothers of Ramla who murdered Rim Abu Ghanem. Now through a plea deal they will receive only manslaughter charges because Rim was a woman and not a man and thus, apparently, not deserving of having her murderers jailed for murder. At Hebrew University there is Prof. Eyal Ben-Ari whose own female doctoral students accused him of sexual harassment and rape for more than a year and the authorities did nothing until a police investigation was opened and then, quietly, closed.
In Europe a recent story out of Holland reveals the underside of legalized prostitution. Women were sold to brothel owners, forced to engage in sex with more than a dozen clients a day and the German-Turkish brothel owners forced the women to have the names of their ‘owners’ tattooed on their bodies. They were thus branded like cattle, sold like meat and will be tossed into the trash one day by their ‘owners’ like trash. Such is the fate of women in a democratic ‘progressive’ western society.
We live in a harsh world which has little respect for women. This is not only an Israeli phenomenon. In New York there was Kitty Genovese who was beaten and murdered for half an hour while citizens looked on in New York in 1964. Had Kitty bean Carl there is no doubt people would have intervened. But 13 year old boys aren’t placed in a hole and stoned to death while a UN agency refuses to even tell us their name either. We must fight for women’s rights, especially the most marginal women, because no woman should die in our world in such a savage manner and not have the world know her name.
The importance of gun ownership
October 30th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
When colt pistols first began marketing its firearms it called it the equalizer. “God made all men, Colt made them equal.” This statement, from what should have been a stodgy gun maker and its clients, has a revolutionary, seemingly leftist, element to it. The gun, in the hands of the poor, makes them equal to the wealthiest man. In history it has usually been the inability to fashion weapons that has separated society so easily into classes. During the time of tribalism and hunting and gathering all the men in the tribe could usually fashion their own weapons, which were usually quite simple such as bows and arrows or spears and clubs. But as society progressed so did the weapons. Roman weapons were pieces of art, sharpened by master craftsmen. While slaves and savage peoples might surely steal them or get a hold them, they could not produce them. During the feudal period the weapons and amour of a knight were the work likewise of master blacksmiths. Not only health and good living separated the knight from the serfs, they simply had no chance against him should they revolt. This is why revolts never succeeded in feudal Europe. With the introduction of the rifle and the fact that it is even more complicated to make one would have assumed that the government and the wealthy would have been the only ones with access to such specialized weapons. But in fact Colt provided the people with a radical idea. In a country founded by men whose freedom and need to defend themselves meant they were literally swimming in a glut of weapons there was a natural attachment to having a gun at home. The outgrowth of this in the U.S was a robust firearms industry providing guns for the common man.
The message of Colt is interesting. All men are equal. This statement is also made in discussing man before the law. But in outside society men are not equal. Colt provided humanity with an equalizer, a weapon, that no man, despite his wealth and power, could be protected from. This was brought brutally home in the assassinations of U.S president’s Mckinley and Lincoln. Others were to come. Could a common man have brought down a king during the feudal period or a Roman emperor?
The opposition to gun ownership and laws allowing people to kill burglars in order to defend their homes is distinctly a leftist position, ironically, and it is one grounded in the leftist knowledge that as the elites in society they do not want the poor being able to gun them down. One would have assumed the opposite. The left is the party of the ‘people’. It needs the votes of the savage poor in order to win. But while the wealthy leftist politicians rely on the poor for votes they don’t want the poor being able to kill them. The leftist ideology of a utopian society is built on an image of feudalism. This is why Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Court of the Red Tsar was so interesting a read. It showed the degree to which Stalin’s court simply remade the only feudal court of the Tsar. Serfs were no better off in either, in fact they perished in the millions under Communism and they were also slaves, except under Communism they were called ‘peasants’. There is no surprise that such movements as Communism and Nazism made gun ownership illegal. They did not want the citizens to be equal to the officials.
So we see in the U.S that those who oppose gun ownership the most, such as Rosie O’Donnel, usually live in gated communities, with armed guards. This is the great irony. The wealthy man says that the people should be denied their guns and yet they themselves have armed guards and ‘armed response’ security. In Israel the recent passage of the ‘Dromi Law’, named after a farmer who shot a Bedouin who was robbing his property, has made it easier for people to shoot to defend their property. Who opposes the law? The Communist and leftist political parties. They don’t want the people to be armed. In the U.S by contrast we have the terrorist, Bill Ayers, who as a wealthy intellectual choose to try to murder poor people doing their jobs, such as policeman. Now, when challenged by reporters, he has the gall to call the police for help and ask the reporters to leave his ‘property’, an irony considering as an anarchist he objects to the idea of property. But his reaction is typical. As a wealthy leftist he denies the people the right to bear arms, but he wants his property and a police force to protect him. This is the classic response.
Colt was right in the 1870s. It is even more right today. The right of a person to bear arms should not be infringed by a government. Everytime the right of the people to their weapons has been infringed terrible things have followed. The government cannot be trusted to have a monopoly on firepower, not under Rome or the Feudal knights or today. Man must always be able to reach for his equalizer in order to oppose tyranny.
A review of 'The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes' by Avraham Burg, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman
November 8th, 2008
Avraham Burg was a leadering member of the Israeli establishment, a head of the Jewish agency, World Zionist organization, speaker of the Knesset, a resident of the posh Kibbutz Nataf, businessman, ‘Zionist’, leftist intellectual, ‘religious’ person and member of the government. Burg speaks in a recent interview to the British daily The Independent, home of the anti-semite Robert Fisk. The Independent calls him “Israel’s new prophet.” He speaks about a “Holocaust industry.” He speaks about how he “singlehandedly” shook the foundations of the “Zionist establishment.” He speaks of how Israel is “racist” and how he has a duty to care about the “children of the Palestinians.” He speaks about the “obsessive and cheapening use or abuse of the Holocaust as a theological pillar of Jewish identity.” He desires to leave the “Judaism of the Ghetto for Humanistic universal Judaism.” He notes this his father was a “German Jew” who opposed the execution of Adolph Eichmann. He speaks about the good Jews, those of the “sacred memory” who died in the Holocaust. He speaks of how he has moved to Europe and loved the “cultural melaei of Berlin” and how Jews have a duty to “set Germany free” from Holocaust guilt. He compares Israel to the Weimer Republic and claims that the Arabs are the new Jews and how Israel is in the incubation period of creating a new Nazism. He admires Professor yeshayu Leibowitz, an Israeli intellectual who claimed Israel was not worth being allowd to exist because of the ‘occupation’ and that Israel was made up of “Judeao-Nazis” who are a “pathological cycle of the abused child becoming a violent parent.” Burg calls Israel’s occupation an “Israeli Anschluss” using the word for the German invasion of Austria in 1938. Burg stresses his love for Diaspora judaism, his commitment for “social justice” and his love of the “humanism and universalism.” For Burg “Israel is part of Europe.” He is a “human being. I belong to humanity.” He opposes French president Sarkozy because he sees Sarkozy as intolerant towards Islam. He desires that Israel become part of the EU and asks “Is it getting lost into the American melting pot or is it being a stone in the ongoing beautiful mosaic of Europe?"” He supports the development of a “European Islam” where Europe becomes Islamic.
Burg's recent polemic should not be taken at face value. It is both representative of an entire way of life, an entire class, thought process, track in human history and political pursuasion, a culture, and also representative of the mental perversion, the psychic decline, of a single individual. Both are tragic. In terms of psychosis Mr. Burg represents the general perversions and antics of German Jews and their descendants. He is connected, theologically, with Hannah Arendt and Leo Beack and other self-hating German Jews such as Baruch Kimmerling for which everything is the Holocaust, especially when it is the Jews. In the Freudian world of the surviving German Jews and their descendants such as Norman Finkelstien, the Jews become the Nazis, because absent of actual Nazis they can only find Nazis among their own people, a people that when they were numerous they hated. We must only recall that in Hamburg after the Holocaust the 70 surviving members of the community refused to share their properties and synagogoues and community areas with the thousands of 'Ostjuden' who had ended up there as refugees. Such was the contempt of the German Jews for other Jews.
But now those 'Ostjuden' have become for them the 'Nazis' partly out of desire to keep their names in the press and keep themselves interesting, and partly due to a bizarre psychological tragedy. For the German Jews the Jews are the Nazis because they believe the Jewish people have been traumatized by the Holocaust. Except ironically most of the Jews today labeled and slandered as 'Nazis' by German-Jewish intellectuals are actually Jews from outside of Europe who have no connection to the Holocaust. It is the Jews of the Sephardie, Mizrachi, Ethiopian and Russian communities who make up Israel, not European Holocaust survivors. And yet the German Jewish intellectuals and their descendants would have us believe that the Jews, because of the trauma of the Holocaust, have become the 'new Nazis' and the Palestinians the 'new Jews' and the Jews take out their trauma on the Palestinians. It is not a unique belief of Avraham Burg, but a widespread belief among a certain class of Jewish self-hating intellectuals such as Israel Shahak, Moshe Lieberman, Joel Kovel, Michael Hoffman, Tanya Reinhardt, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Baruch Kimmerling and Jonathan Cook. And yet the irony of the claim is that it is they who suffer the trauma of the Holocaust, for they are the German Jews. It is not the Jews of Israel, the off-spring of the pre-Holocaust Sabras such as Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon, or the offspring of the yemenite immigrants, the offspring of cobblers from Aleppo or wine merchants from Persia or shoemakers from Kabul. No it is not the offspring of Soviet Jewish engineers or Ethiopian Jewish farmers who have this trauma. It is the German Jew who has this 'trauma'. But there are very few German Jews today, just as there are very few European Jews. The Jews of Russia didn't suffer the 'trauma' of the Holocaust. Those that did are dead. Those that survived were the one's whose towns were evacuated to the East and who served in Stalin's Great Patriotic War. They were the conquering men of Eastern Europe who stood like giants over the Nazi corpse. The American Jews don't suffer from this problem for they also came as liberators to Europe to cleanse Europe of its disease of Nazism. 1.5 million Jews fought on the side of the allied armies in World War two. These were not victims. 200,000 Soviet Jews alone died in fighting units in the war. In all, how many Holocaust survivors truly came to Israel and what percentage are they and their descendants of the county today? Some 500,000-650,000 Holocaust survivors came to Israel between 1945 and 1950 and today there are between 250,000-400,000 people in Israel who are classified as Holocaust survivors. They are therefore Less than 10% of the Jewish population. Between 1945 and 1958 they formed almost half the population of the country until the arrival of 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands during the same period caused their percentage to decrease (Israel's Jewish population was 790,000 in 1949, it had been 600,000 in 1945, in 1958 it was 2 million). The theory that the trauma of the survivor accounts for the behavior of Israel is meaningless, it would be like blaming some behavior of the United States foreign policy on the 13% of the U.S which is descendants of African slaves and saying their trauma has caused the U.S to do something. Unfortunatly German Jews require that they be the center of attention and that since they are no longer a cultural center as they were before 1939 and people are less and less interested in them as holocaust survivors or as symbols of a 'vanished Europe' and 'vanished culture' they have found that their only niche is the defamation of Israel and its citizens. The trauma of Holocaust survivors is not that they take out their pain on Palestinians but that they take out their pain on other Jews and accuse those other Jews of being 'Nazis'. Here the German Jews continue their policy of hatred, discrimination and disdain for those they perceive as less cultured then themselves, such as the 'Ost Juden' now called 'ultra-orthodox' or the 'blacks' who we know as Sephardim, Mizrachim and others. Nothing is more upsetting for the descandants of German Jews than to see their old national enemies, the Russians, in the form of the Russian Jews, outnumbering them in Israel and elsewhere. So they heap scorn on Israel, comparing it to a Nazi country, but what we have witnessed is the final defeat of German Jewry and its policy of assimilation, communism, self-hatred and arrogance that they attempted to mete out to the Jewish people. Burg and his ilk represent the last attempt, like Sitting Bull's Last Stand, to flail about, now trying to encourage anti-semitism among Europeans, to claim the Holocaust is a 'universal story' and has nothing to do with Jews, and to claim the Jewish religion is 'universal' and even to claim that we need a 'European Islam', whatever it takes to destroy the Jewish people for which German Jews long ago lost any affinity for. But in the end, given the low birth rates of the Burgs and Finkelsteins and Chomskys, it is the Jews that they have hated who will defeat them, not in the war of intellectuals, or the battle of brute strength, but in the battle of the births, for the long term impact of the German Jews, while we will be forced to forever recall their utopian Weimer Republic, will not be felt demographically and intellectually they will die out if only because there will be no more of them soon. Burg is the last generation to haunt us. Hannah Arendt had a sexual affair with the chief philosopher of Nazism, Martin Heidegger, and she defended him at his trial, and she then accused the Jews of causing the Holocaust and 'collaborating' with the Nazis, while at the same time she supported Eichmann at his trial and defined him as 'banal' or 'dull', excusing his acts. Now Burg compares Israel to the Nazis. But Mr. Burg, how long do you have left in this world? Arendt died in 1975. Kimmerling is gone. Chomksy and Finkelstein will go too. And you, Mr. Burg, you will also go. They call Burg a prophet. That is what the European calls him, Europeans who don't believe in prophets. Time defeats Nazism. It was time that was on the side of man against Nazism. It was time that was on our side against Communism. It died to. Time is on our side against Mr. Burg and his thought process. Each Jewish child that is born to an Orthodox Jew, a Sephardie, a Russian Jew or an Ethiopian defeats the Burgs and fulfills the promise of the Jewish people. Children defeat self-hatred and anti-Semitism. Children defeat Nazism. Children defeat the German Jewish legacy. No greater yoke hangs around the neck of the Jewish people than the endless accusations that Jews are the 'Nazis' and Palestinians are the 'Jews', an accusation made by the European and his German-Jewish friends. But the European has no children. Mohammed is the most popular name in European schools. Nazism traumatized the European and caused him to have less children. Now, in his last fit of childish anger, the European lashes out at the Jews and calls them 'Nazis'. But there will be no Europeans in 50 years. They are gone from this world. They and their civilization. Burg and Europe are dying and all we can do is rejoice over the corpse of this thing, this civilization that exterminated the Jews and then called the surviving Jews 'Nazis' and even had the gall to say that it was the act of exterminating the Jew, the trauma caused by it, that made the Jew a Nazi. So the European wins either way, he murders the Jews and gets rid of him and if the Jew survives then he says of the Jew, 'you are the murderer'. Oh, but the European neglects to have children along the way and so he dies to. And the Jew lives on. It is funny to think of an Orthodox-Jewish family travelling around Europe in fifty years seeing the graves of Avraham Burg and Tony Judt and Robert Fisk and Alan Hart and all the intellectual Europeans who called Jews 'Nazis'. To think of the idea that those Europeans were so full of their hate that they neglected to have children. No Orthodox Jew reads the filth that eminates forth from the Burg or from the Independent or Oxford. So the orthodox Jew won't even care to know the grave of the European or the Burg. And that is the great irony. Modernity and its humanism brought this world nothing. Where was it to stop the genocide in Rwanda?. It was no where to be found. It was a lie. It was rhetoric and platitudes and accusations. It was 'human rights'. It was 'social justice'. It was 'universal'. But it was none of those things. It was, in truth, terrorism and self-hate and rape and sex-slavery and prostitution, and the degredation of women, it was 'Fashion TV' and 'Who wants to be America's next top model', it was mini-skirts and fake breasts and nose jobs and tummy tucks. It was pornography and strippers and strip teases and BDSM and whore houses and brothels. It was protest tourism and wearing your Khaffiya and justifyuing terrorism and loving the 'other' and diversity and multi-culturalism and moral relativsm. Modernity. It died because it did not produce. It did not have children. It was self love and self obsession and self exploitation and arrogant and self-fulfilling and selfish. And we witness it dying. Day by day. And as it dies it gives more hate and becomes more angry. Every day as it grows smaller and smaller with the knowledge that there can be no universalism it desires to take vengeance upon the Jewish people for it is angry that they have outlasted it. It cannot understand how the Jews can defeat it and survive it. And that is why it desires, in its last act, to do what it could not do over a thousand years, with all the technology at its disposal in 1942, all of its power, it desires to do intellectually what it could not do with its hands, for Europeans do seldom use their hands for anything meaningful, but it speaks to a stone floor. It falls on deaf ears. Rich Europeans sit at home and read a review in the Independent with Avraham Burg and they say 'see, the Jews monopolize the Holocaust and make it an industry, see the Jews are the real Nazis, the Jews….the Jews….the Jews….the Jews…" But they are so busy reading the Independent they do not have sexual intercourse and when they do they resort to some perversion. And all the while the Orthodox Jew is producing, more children, more and more and more. Each time the European calls a Jew a Nazi, an Orthodox Jewish child is born. It is like each time a bell rings an angel gets his wings. The European rings the bell of 'Jews are Nazis' and more and more Jews are born. It is surprising to think that the Jews defeated the Europeans, with all their white haired well dressed men who sit at the EU, to think that they have been defeated, but they have. They may have their mistresses and their fancy houses and their fast cars and their wine tastings, but we have children. And children are the future. Europeans and Avraham Burg is the past.
Issue 60
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel
Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
November 10th, 2008
1) Could we imagine such a world: If we didn’t live in this world could we imagine it? Could we imagine that people travel from one country to another, live in that country and enjoy its benefits and then blow up a bus in that country murder people they have never met and who never did anything to them? Could we imagine a society when women are bought and sold as chattel? I doubt we could imagine the horrors this world produces and for that reason we should question how ‘progressive’ our society is and what, if any, benefits all our liberalism and democracy has brought us.
2) The world will never know her name: (dis) honourable killings and the war on women: Whether women live in an Islamic society or a western liberal one they may face the same fate. In a recent case in Somalia a 13 year old girl was placed in a hole up to her neck and stoned to death by ‘brave’ men who claimed she had dishonored them, apparently because three of them had been ‘enticed’ to rape her. But in Holland some brothels were recently found to have women who had been forcibly tattooed with the names of their ‘owners’. In Israel a judge sympathized with pimps who beat women who refused to ‘work’ during their periods and declared a women has ‘freedom of movement’ if her pimp takes her to a gynecologist once a month. Such a world. Liberal. Progressive. Democratic. Dictatorship. Islamist. The same. Each is satanic and each destroys the soul of humanity.
3) The importance of gun ownership: Colt handguns declared in their earliest advertising that ‘God made all men, Colt made them equal.’ The danger many see in gun ownership by the common man is that it makes him equal to the most powerful man. It was not always this way. Serfs could rarely bring down a feudal lord wearing armor. Gun ownership is the one thing that restrains government from murdering the citizenry.
4) A review of 'The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes' by Avraham Burg, is published by Palgrave Macmillan: Avraham Burg profited from claiming to be a Zionist. He was a head of the Jewish Agency and respected member of the Knesset. Now he claims the Holocaust is an ‘industry’ and that the Jews must set the Germans free from their guilt. Yet he also claims Israel is akin to the Weimer Republic, a pre-fascist state. The Golan is Israel’s ‘Anschluss.’ Burg believes Israel should be part of Europe and that Europe should become Islamic. In light of Bradley Burston declaring “this year this Jew is embracing Jihad” perhaps we should not be surprised. But Burg’s psychological breakdown must be examined in light of his German Jewish heritage. Can he really tell us that the Israel is ‘European’ when a majority of its Jews are not from Europe. Can he tell us it ‘uses’ the Holocaust when a majority of the Jews in Israel have nothing to do with Europe and Europe’s Nazi history. Burg’s outburst represents the last German-Jewish-Israeli-Ashkenazi-elite’s assault on Israel and must be seen in that context.
Could we imagine such a world
November 5th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
If we didn’t live in this world could we imagine it? Let us imagine that we didn’t know this world and let us forget all the things we know about it and imagine that someone came and told a story about such a world. Lets say they told us about a place where women are bought and sold in the backrooms of dank apartments and in restrooms of dirty restaurants. They are placed on display nude and checked for their desirability before being handed over from one man to another for the equivalent of a month’s worth of wages in society. Imagine a place where men from one country and from one religion travel thousands of miles to other lands and plant bombs so as to kill people they have never met and never interacted with and who have never harmed them. Let us imagine a place where those who benefit the most from the rights granted to them by society are the first to condemn that society and demand its destruction, they are the least likely to serve that society but instead demand that poorer people serve that society and die for it so that they can enjoy their freedom to hate the society that begat them. If we learned of such a place, where women are chattel, where people murder others for no reason and where the wealthy and the intellectuals, the most endowed and privileged members of society, hate their own countries, would we want to live in such a world? Would we really choose to live there? Would we think any of it makes any sense. Just think again about this world we have become used to. Think of this thing, terrorism, we have become used to. Think of our society where some members decide, on a whim, to blow up other members of the world for no reason. Think of the Madrid and London bombings and 9/11 and think about how those who carried them out were granted all the freedoms and welfare from those countries and they chose to murder people they had never met and then afterward their acts were described by the media as part of a ‘struggle’ and that they were ‘militants’ with ‘grievances’ and how intellectuals accused those who died of being ‘Eichmans’ and said that there was a ‘myth of the innocent victim’ and then said “revenge solves nothing.” Why would we choose such a society? Who would? If someone said that this society is also a good one because it has ‘democracy’ and it has ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom of speech’ might we question what those things are if they produce things.
We live in such a world and I ask, is such a world truly worth it? I mean is it worth anything? In our world where Islamic law is worshipped and loved in the West, where the Archbishop of Canterbury supports its implication and where we already have Shariah courts allowed to rule in domestic violence cases in the U.K. I ask, is such a world worth anything? And I ask you to consider this story: Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a 13 year old girl in Somalia was raped by three adult males while on the way to her grandmothers. He took her to the police. They brought her to the Islamic Shariah court which pronounced her guilty of 'adultery’ even though she was not married. She was brought to a football stadium where a 1,000 men gathered to watch her execution. She was led out and she asked of the men "what do you want from me." The grown men said to the 13 year old girl "We will do what Allah has instructed us." She saw then that they intended to kill her and said "I am not going. Don't kill me." They took her to a hole that they had dug in the ground and they buried her up to her neck, making sure the headscarf remained on her head lest her immodesty offend the men. 50 grown men stoned the 13 year old girl's head. They then brought nurses to see if she was dead. The nurses removed her body from the ground and said she was not dead. So they re-buried her and stoned her until she died. Amnesty International representatives and a "human rights activist" and other journalists were on the scene to witness what happened. A Unicef official from the UN was also nearby receiving reports. His name is Christian Balslev-Olesen. I will not use his first name again for he is an insult to that word and it should be stricken from his name. Why do we live in such a godless world? Let us think again about the story. A 13 year old girl. Let us pause. A 13 year old girl. She was raped by 3 grown men. She is accused of being the criminal and murdered by being buried up to her neck so that 50 grown men can stone her. I want to ask again. Why do we live in such a godless world? And think of her last moments. She can see the grown men, the same men that raped her. She can also see the Human Rights Activist. She can see the Unicef workers. She can see the BBC reporters. She can see Christian Balslev-Olesen. I want you to think again of this scene. A 13 year old girl is forced into a hole in the ground so that 50 grown men can stone her head. All the while Europeans stand around and take notes. A human rights activist takes notes. I want you to think again of this. This world. Our world. Is it a place that deserves justice? Is it a place that deserves humanity? Does it deserve anything? It deserves justice. Amnesty International deserves Justice for this. Unicef deserves justice for this. Human rights activists and the reporters present deserve justice for this. Mr. Braslev-Olesen, you deserve justice for this. Islam, that evil thing that destroys this world and takes the soul from humanity, that thing that rapes a 13 year old and then stones her, that thing that requires she be buried up to her neck so that grown men may stone her, Islam deserves justice. Will justice come to these things? No. Braslev-Olesen will return to his Villa in whatever European country he resides. Will someone one day put a knife to his throat and drag him to his back patio and place him in a hole and stone him to death? No. There will be no justice. Do these Muslims, these animals, do they, as they raise a stone over their head to throw at a 13 year old girl, do they have any humanity? Are they human? What kind of a man can do such a thing? In my mind the world is not worth our effort. Humanity is not worth anything. When the world media's representatives and the UN representatives can look on and do nothing, when grown men stone 13 year old girls and call its 'God's will', I cannot say we live in any sort of human society. We live in nothing. Will Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow ever return to us? Will she ever have her justice? It is on our shoulders to wait until Mr. Braslev-Olesen dies and then to seek out his grave and demolish it so that no memory of him remains. The name Braslev-Olesen is a curse on humanity, only slightly less a curse than that thing called Mohammed that was vomited forth in the 7th century. We can do that bit of justice for a 13 year old girl who died at the hands of men while another man sat by. May the UN and Islam be buried up to their necks in the blood they have watched be spilled and may they and this world die the death that both so brilliantly deserve. I can think of no other verdict for such a place. Our own comforts are meaningless if such crimes are committed.
The world will never know her name: (dis) honourable killings and the war on women
November 5th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
Hidden on a sidebar on page seven of the International Herald Tribune on November 5th, 2008 was the headline ‘Girl is stoned to death by Islamists in Somalia.’ The United Nations reported that a 13 year old girl who had been raped by three men and complained to police was taken by men, placed in a hole, and stoned to death. Under Islamic law she was accused of ‘adultery’, a crime punishable by death. We won’t ever know her name. In her society she may not have even had a name that mattered. She was chattel, less valuable than a mule, a piece of meat to be raped for the pleasure of men and then stoned by those same men for ‘dishonouring’ her family.
Take the recent case where the Tel Aviv District court judge Dalia Ganot freed five suspected human traffickers because, according to the judge, the prostitutes were not “forced into sex…no evidence was brought from which one can infer the existence of supervision or control over the movements of the plaintiffs or the scope of their work.” According to reports “Ganot wrote in her ruling that the two complainants seemed to have freedom of movement, noting that one of the defendants said he took them to the gynecologist and the supermarket, as well as the beach and Superland.” That is freedom of movement for a woman, a human being? If they are taken to a gynecologist once a month to make sure they aren’t pregnant from being forced to have sex with 13 men a day? That is freedom of movement? But Ganot went further, noting that “it is normal for a pimp to be angry if his prostitute refuses to work on her period.” But we don’t even know the womens’ names.
There is also the recent story entitled; ‘Brothels forbid prostitutes to use condoms to prevent evidence.” ‘Massage parlors’ forbid their prostitutes from using condoms. One woman relates that “you work an eight hour shift..they [the owners] are the one’s making the profits while we’re taking risks.” But the owner has the best interests of the men at heart: “the damage a woman carrier can do is horrendous.” While the newspaper and other media investigators never have problems gaining entrance to these places the police seem oblivious.
Or maybe we should think of the story of the Abu Ghanem brothers of Ramla who murdered Rim Abu Ghanem. Now through a plea deal they will receive only manslaughter charges because Rim was a woman and not a man and thus, apparently, not deserving of having her murderers jailed for murder. At Hebrew University there is Prof. Eyal Ben-Ari whose own female doctoral students accused him of sexual harassment and rape for more than a year and the authorities did nothing until a police investigation was opened and then, quietly, closed.
In Europe a recent story out of Holland reveals the underside of legalized prostitution. Women were sold to brothel owners, forced to engage in sex with more than a dozen clients a day and the German-Turkish brothel owners forced the women to have the names of their ‘owners’ tattooed on their bodies. They were thus branded like cattle, sold like meat and will be tossed into the trash one day by their ‘owners’ like trash. Such is the fate of women in a democratic ‘progressive’ western society.
We live in a harsh world which has little respect for women. This is not only an Israeli phenomenon. In New York there was Kitty Genovese who was beaten and murdered for half an hour while citizens looked on in New York in 1964. Had Kitty bean Carl there is no doubt people would have intervened. But 13 year old boys aren’t placed in a hole and stoned to death while a UN agency refuses to even tell us their name either. We must fight for women’s rights, especially the most marginal women, because no woman should die in our world in such a savage manner and not have the world know her name.
The importance of gun ownership
October 30th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman
When colt pistols first began marketing its firearms it called it the equalizer. “God made all men, Colt made them equal.” This statement, from what should have been a stodgy gun maker and its clients, has a revolutionary, seemingly leftist, element to it. The gun, in the hands of the poor, makes them equal to the wealthiest man. In history it has usually been the inability to fashion weapons that has separated society so easily into classes. During the time of tribalism and hunting and gathering all the men in the tribe could usually fashion their own weapons, which were usually quite simple such as bows and arrows or spears and clubs. But as society progressed so did the weapons. Roman weapons were pieces of art, sharpened by master craftsmen. While slaves and savage peoples might surely steal them or get a hold them, they could not produce them. During the feudal period the weapons and amour of a knight were the work likewise of master blacksmiths. Not only health and good living separated the knight from the serfs, they simply had no chance against him should they revolt. This is why revolts never succeeded in feudal Europe. With the introduction of the rifle and the fact that it is even more complicated to make one would have assumed that the government and the wealthy would have been the only ones with access to such specialized weapons. But in fact Colt provided the people with a radical idea. In a country founded by men whose freedom and need to defend themselves meant they were literally swimming in a glut of weapons there was a natural attachment to having a gun at home. The outgrowth of this in the U.S was a robust firearms industry providing guns for the common man.
The message of Colt is interesting. All men are equal. This statement is also made in discussing man before the law. But in outside society men are not equal. Colt provided humanity with an equalizer, a weapon, that no man, despite his wealth and power, could be protected from. This was brought brutally home in the assassinations of U.S president’s Mckinley and Lincoln. Others were to come. Could a common man have brought down a king during the feudal period or a Roman emperor?
The opposition to gun ownership and laws allowing people to kill burglars in order to defend their homes is distinctly a leftist position, ironically, and it is one grounded in the leftist knowledge that as the elites in society they do not want the poor being able to gun them down. One would have assumed the opposite. The left is the party of the ‘people’. It needs the votes of the savage poor in order to win. But while the wealthy leftist politicians rely on the poor for votes they don’t want the poor being able to kill them. The leftist ideology of a utopian society is built on an image of feudalism. This is why Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Court of the Red Tsar was so interesting a read. It showed the degree to which Stalin’s court simply remade the only feudal court of the Tsar. Serfs were no better off in either, in fact they perished in the millions under Communism and they were also slaves, except under Communism they were called ‘peasants’. There is no surprise that such movements as Communism and Nazism made gun ownership illegal. They did not want the citizens to be equal to the officials.
So we see in the U.S that those who oppose gun ownership the most, such as Rosie O’Donnel, usually live in gated communities, with armed guards. This is the great irony. The wealthy man says that the people should be denied their guns and yet they themselves have armed guards and ‘armed response’ security. In Israel the recent passage of the ‘Dromi Law’, named after a farmer who shot a Bedouin who was robbing his property, has made it easier for people to shoot to defend their property. Who opposes the law? The Communist and leftist political parties. They don’t want the people to be armed. In the U.S by contrast we have the terrorist, Bill Ayers, who as a wealthy intellectual choose to try to murder poor people doing their jobs, such as policeman. Now, when challenged by reporters, he has the gall to call the police for help and ask the reporters to leave his ‘property’, an irony considering as an anarchist he objects to the idea of property. But his reaction is typical. As a wealthy leftist he denies the people the right to bear arms, but he wants his property and a police force to protect him. This is the classic response.
Colt was right in the 1870s. It is even more right today. The right of a person to bear arms should not be infringed by a government. Everytime the right of the people to their weapons has been infringed terrible things have followed. The government cannot be trusted to have a monopoly on firepower, not under Rome or the Feudal knights or today. Man must always be able to reach for his equalizer in order to oppose tyranny.
A review of 'The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes' by Avraham Burg, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman
November 8th, 2008
Avraham Burg was a leadering member of the Israeli establishment, a head of the Jewish agency, World Zionist organization, speaker of the Knesset, a resident of the posh Kibbutz Nataf, businessman, ‘Zionist’, leftist intellectual, ‘religious’ person and member of the government. Burg speaks in a recent interview to the British daily The Independent, home of the anti-semite Robert Fisk. The Independent calls him “Israel’s new prophet.” He speaks about a “Holocaust industry.” He speaks about how he “singlehandedly” shook the foundations of the “Zionist establishment.” He speaks of how Israel is “racist” and how he has a duty to care about the “children of the Palestinians.” He speaks about the “obsessive and cheapening use or abuse of the Holocaust as a theological pillar of Jewish identity.” He desires to leave the “Judaism of the Ghetto for Humanistic universal Judaism.” He notes this his father was a “German Jew” who opposed the execution of Adolph Eichmann. He speaks about the good Jews, those of the “sacred memory” who died in the Holocaust. He speaks of how he has moved to Europe and loved the “cultural melaei of Berlin” and how Jews have a duty to “set Germany free” from Holocaust guilt. He compares Israel to the Weimer Republic and claims that the Arabs are the new Jews and how Israel is in the incubation period of creating a new Nazism. He admires Professor yeshayu Leibowitz, an Israeli intellectual who claimed Israel was not worth being allowd to exist because of the ‘occupation’ and that Israel was made up of “Judeao-Nazis” who are a “pathological cycle of the abused child becoming a violent parent.” Burg calls Israel’s occupation an “Israeli Anschluss” using the word for the German invasion of Austria in 1938. Burg stresses his love for Diaspora judaism, his commitment for “social justice” and his love of the “humanism and universalism.” For Burg “Israel is part of Europe.” He is a “human being. I belong to humanity.” He opposes French president Sarkozy because he sees Sarkozy as intolerant towards Islam. He desires that Israel become part of the EU and asks “Is it getting lost into the American melting pot or is it being a stone in the ongoing beautiful mosaic of Europe?"” He supports the development of a “European Islam” where Europe becomes Islamic.
Burg's recent polemic should not be taken at face value. It is both representative of an entire way of life, an entire class, thought process, track in human history and political pursuasion, a culture, and also representative of the mental perversion, the psychic decline, of a single individual. Both are tragic. In terms of psychosis Mr. Burg represents the general perversions and antics of German Jews and their descendants. He is connected, theologically, with Hannah Arendt and Leo Beack and other self-hating German Jews such as Baruch Kimmerling for which everything is the Holocaust, especially when it is the Jews. In the Freudian world of the surviving German Jews and their descendants such as Norman Finkelstien, the Jews become the Nazis, because absent of actual Nazis they can only find Nazis among their own people, a people that when they were numerous they hated. We must only recall that in Hamburg after the Holocaust the 70 surviving members of the community refused to share their properties and synagogoues and community areas with the thousands of 'Ostjuden' who had ended up there as refugees. Such was the contempt of the German Jews for other Jews.
But now those 'Ostjuden' have become for them the 'Nazis' partly out of desire to keep their names in the press and keep themselves interesting, and partly due to a bizarre psychological tragedy. For the German Jews the Jews are the Nazis because they believe the Jewish people have been traumatized by the Holocaust. Except ironically most of the Jews today labeled and slandered as 'Nazis' by German-Jewish intellectuals are actually Jews from outside of Europe who have no connection to the Holocaust. It is the Jews of the Sephardie, Mizrachi, Ethiopian and Russian communities who make up Israel, not European Holocaust survivors. And yet the German Jewish intellectuals and their descendants would have us believe that the Jews, because of the trauma of the Holocaust, have become the 'new Nazis' and the Palestinians the 'new Jews' and the Jews take out their trauma on the Palestinians. It is not a unique belief of Avraham Burg, but a widespread belief among a certain class of Jewish self-hating intellectuals such as Israel Shahak, Moshe Lieberman, Joel Kovel, Michael Hoffman, Tanya Reinhardt, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Baruch Kimmerling and Jonathan Cook. And yet the irony of the claim is that it is they who suffer the trauma of the Holocaust, for they are the German Jews. It is not the Jews of Israel, the off-spring of the pre-Holocaust Sabras such as Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon, or the offspring of the yemenite immigrants, the offspring of cobblers from Aleppo or wine merchants from Persia or shoemakers from Kabul. No it is not the offspring of Soviet Jewish engineers or Ethiopian Jewish farmers who have this trauma. It is the German Jew who has this 'trauma'. But there are very few German Jews today, just as there are very few European Jews. The Jews of Russia didn't suffer the 'trauma' of the Holocaust. Those that did are dead. Those that survived were the one's whose towns were evacuated to the East and who served in Stalin's Great Patriotic War. They were the conquering men of Eastern Europe who stood like giants over the Nazi corpse. The American Jews don't suffer from this problem for they also came as liberators to Europe to cleanse Europe of its disease of Nazism. 1.5 million Jews fought on the side of the allied armies in World War two. These were not victims. 200,000 Soviet Jews alone died in fighting units in the war. In all, how many Holocaust survivors truly came to Israel and what percentage are they and their descendants of the county today? Some 500,000-650,000 Holocaust survivors came to Israel between 1945 and 1950 and today there are between 250,000-400,000 people in Israel who are classified as Holocaust survivors. They are therefore Less than 10% of the Jewish population. Between 1945 and 1958 they formed almost half the population of the country until the arrival of 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands during the same period caused their percentage to decrease (Israel's Jewish population was 790,000 in 1949, it had been 600,000 in 1945, in 1958 it was 2 million). The theory that the trauma of the survivor accounts for the behavior of Israel is meaningless, it would be like blaming some behavior of the United States foreign policy on the 13% of the U.S which is descendants of African slaves and saying their trauma has caused the U.S to do something. Unfortunatly German Jews require that they be the center of attention and that since they are no longer a cultural center as they were before 1939 and people are less and less interested in them as holocaust survivors or as symbols of a 'vanished Europe' and 'vanished culture' they have found that their only niche is the defamation of Israel and its citizens. The trauma of Holocaust survivors is not that they take out their pain on Palestinians but that they take out their pain on other Jews and accuse those other Jews of being 'Nazis'. Here the German Jews continue their policy of hatred, discrimination and disdain for those they perceive as less cultured then themselves, such as the 'Ost Juden' now called 'ultra-orthodox' or the 'blacks' who we know as Sephardim, Mizrachim and others. Nothing is more upsetting for the descandants of German Jews than to see their old national enemies, the Russians, in the form of the Russian Jews, outnumbering them in Israel and elsewhere. So they heap scorn on Israel, comparing it to a Nazi country, but what we have witnessed is the final defeat of German Jewry and its policy of assimilation, communism, self-hatred and arrogance that they attempted to mete out to the Jewish people. Burg and his ilk represent the last attempt, like Sitting Bull's Last Stand, to flail about, now trying to encourage anti-semitism among Europeans, to claim the Holocaust is a 'universal story' and has nothing to do with Jews, and to claim the Jewish religion is 'universal' and even to claim that we need a 'European Islam', whatever it takes to destroy the Jewish people for which German Jews long ago lost any affinity for. But in the end, given the low birth rates of the Burgs and Finkelsteins and Chomskys, it is the Jews that they have hated who will defeat them, not in the war of intellectuals, or the battle of brute strength, but in the battle of the births, for the long term impact of the German Jews, while we will be forced to forever recall their utopian Weimer Republic, will not be felt demographically and intellectually they will die out if only because there will be no more of them soon. Burg is the last generation to haunt us. Hannah Arendt had a sexual affair with the chief philosopher of Nazism, Martin Heidegger, and she defended him at his trial, and she then accused the Jews of causing the Holocaust and 'collaborating' with the Nazis, while at the same time she supported Eichmann at his trial and defined him as 'banal' or 'dull', excusing his acts. Now Burg compares Israel to the Nazis. But Mr. Burg, how long do you have left in this world? Arendt died in 1975. Kimmerling is gone. Chomksy and Finkelstein will go too. And you, Mr. Burg, you will also go. They call Burg a prophet. That is what the European calls him, Europeans who don't believe in prophets. Time defeats Nazism. It was time that was on the side of man against Nazism. It was time that was on our side against Communism. It died to. Time is on our side against Mr. Burg and his thought process. Each Jewish child that is born to an Orthodox Jew, a Sephardie, a Russian Jew or an Ethiopian defeats the Burgs and fulfills the promise of the Jewish people. Children defeat self-hatred and anti-Semitism. Children defeat Nazism. Children defeat the German Jewish legacy. No greater yoke hangs around the neck of the Jewish people than the endless accusations that Jews are the 'Nazis' and Palestinians are the 'Jews', an accusation made by the European and his German-Jewish friends. But the European has no children. Mohammed is the most popular name in European schools. Nazism traumatized the European and caused him to have less children. Now, in his last fit of childish anger, the European lashes out at the Jews and calls them 'Nazis'. But there will be no Europeans in 50 years. They are gone from this world. They and their civilization. Burg and Europe are dying and all we can do is rejoice over the corpse of this thing, this civilization that exterminated the Jews and then called the surviving Jews 'Nazis' and even had the gall to say that it was the act of exterminating the Jew, the trauma caused by it, that made the Jew a Nazi. So the European wins either way, he murders the Jews and gets rid of him and if the Jew survives then he says of the Jew, 'you are the murderer'. Oh, but the European neglects to have children along the way and so he dies to. And the Jew lives on. It is funny to think of an Orthodox-Jewish family travelling around Europe in fifty years seeing the graves of Avraham Burg and Tony Judt and Robert Fisk and Alan Hart and all the intellectual Europeans who called Jews 'Nazis'. To think of the idea that those Europeans were so full of their hate that they neglected to have children. No Orthodox Jew reads the filth that eminates forth from the Burg or from the Independent or Oxford. So the orthodox Jew won't even care to know the grave of the European or the Burg. And that is the great irony. Modernity and its humanism brought this world nothing. Where was it to stop the genocide in Rwanda?. It was no where to be found. It was a lie. It was rhetoric and platitudes and accusations. It was 'human rights'. It was 'social justice'. It was 'universal'. But it was none of those things. It was, in truth, terrorism and self-hate and rape and sex-slavery and prostitution, and the degredation of women, it was 'Fashion TV' and 'Who wants to be America's next top model', it was mini-skirts and fake breasts and nose jobs and tummy tucks. It was pornography and strippers and strip teases and BDSM and whore houses and brothels. It was protest tourism and wearing your Khaffiya and justifyuing terrorism and loving the 'other' and diversity and multi-culturalism and moral relativsm. Modernity. It died because it did not produce. It did not have children. It was self love and self obsession and self exploitation and arrogant and self-fulfilling and selfish. And we witness it dying. Day by day. And as it dies it gives more hate and becomes more angry. Every day as it grows smaller and smaller with the knowledge that there can be no universalism it desires to take vengeance upon the Jewish people for it is angry that they have outlasted it. It cannot understand how the Jews can defeat it and survive it. And that is why it desires, in its last act, to do what it could not do over a thousand years, with all the technology at its disposal in 1942, all of its power, it desires to do intellectually what it could not do with its hands, for Europeans do seldom use their hands for anything meaningful, but it speaks to a stone floor. It falls on deaf ears. Rich Europeans sit at home and read a review in the Independent with Avraham Burg and they say 'see, the Jews monopolize the Holocaust and make it an industry, see the Jews are the real Nazis, the Jews….the Jews….the Jews….the Jews…" But they are so busy reading the Independent they do not have sexual intercourse and when they do they resort to some perversion. And all the while the Orthodox Jew is producing, more children, more and more and more. Each time the European calls a Jew a Nazi, an Orthodox Jewish child is born. It is like each time a bell rings an angel gets his wings. The European rings the bell of 'Jews are Nazis' and more and more Jews are born. It is surprising to think that the Jews defeated the Europeans, with all their white haired well dressed men who sit at the EU, to think that they have been defeated, but they have. They may have their mistresses and their fancy houses and their fast cars and their wine tastings, but we have children. And children are the future. Europeans and Avraham Burg is the past.
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