Sunday, May 18, 2008

Terra Incognita 35 The BBC, Myanmar and cults

Terra Incognita
Issue 35
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

May 18th, 2008


1) Jeremy Bowen: BBC’s Hizbullah Spokesman: The recent crises revealed one interesting thing: the BBC is actually the unpaid spokesman for Hizbullah. To be fair it is isn’t the official spokesman, it merely acts like one by deleting video that is ‘offensive’ to Hizbullah and having Hizbullah minders around it and framing the conflict so that Hizbullah is ‘resisting’ and is ‘the opposition’. One wonders, if the BNP did to London what Hizbullah did to Beirut would the BBC describe it merely as ‘the opposition’?

2) To help them we must kill them: a lesson from the UN’s condemnation of Burma: The hysteria with which the world has confronted Myanmar (Burma) during the recent natural disaster is ironic considering the same world contributed to the fact that Burma is so backward through the endless boycotts and sanctions placed on the country. Now we hear that in order to save the people of Burma we must invade the country, enacting a little known U.N provision that allows countries to be taken over if they shirk on their responsibility to their citizens. But should the ‘international community’ and the aid mafia be allowed to transform Burma into yet another colony along the line of the ‘successes’ in Haiti, Kosovo and East Timor.

3) Is Islam a cult? : The recent media hype about a marginal cult in Texas whose main claim to infamy is that they marry girls at a young age and dress in ‘pioneer’ style clothing sheds light on something else. Is Islam so different than the cult being exposed in Texas? Is the downward obedient look of the cult women, the polygamy, the child marriage and the modest old fashioned clothing so different than the state of affairs in Saudi Arabia? Yes the same news organizations fawn every year over the exoticism of the Hajj and Ramadan. Perhaps Islam deserves to be treated they way these Texas cult members have been treated: as a social pariah, or we should all examine the way we are condemning these ‘cults’.







Jeremy Bowen: BBC’s Hizbullah Spokesman
May 12th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman

On May 4th, 2008 when Walid Jumblat began discussing plans with the government to suspend Hizbullah’s communication’s network in Lebanon he didn’t count on one thing: the BBC cannot be suspended by the Lebanese government. The Lebanese government decision to attempt to close down Hizbullah’s communication network and fire a Hizbullah operative employed as security chief at Beirut’s international airport angered Hizbullah and it flexed its muscles, murdering 37 Sunnis and taking over the Sunni neighborhoods of Beirut. When Sunnis tried to bury their dead the funeral processions were shot at. Tens of thousands of Sunnis were cleansed from their communities. The BBC was there throughout it all. When Hizbullah burned down the TV station of Saad Hariri (Lebanese parliamentary leader and son of the Rafik Hariri, the slain Sunni Lebanese leader whose murder forced Syria to pull out of Lebanon) the BBC was there to rejoice. A white British BBC commentator named Crispon Thorold did not mention that Hizbullah had assaulted the media and freedom of speech by destroying a TV station. Instead the BBC said the ‘opposition’ in its campaign of ‘civil disobedience’ had attacked “a real symbolic target…many people and those in Hizbullah resent Saad Hariri and believe he is one of the problems in the state.” This is the BBC’s opinion, not the opinion of ‘many people.’ It is the opinion of the Hizbullah operatives who work for the BBC and who work as their security and who guide them around.

The BBC is primarily the mouthpiece of Hizbullah to the world. It is the sanitizer for Hizbullah’s actions It gives its history of the fighting “The Shia group had taken the streets after the government tried to shut down their telecoms network, causing four days of street fighting. Jeremy Bowen reports from Lebanon.” When BBC cameraman Jeremy Bowen was shot at by Hizbullah during a tour of the Chouf mountains he refused to identify who was shooting at him. He did note that he had a ‘security detail’, no doubt other Hizbullah men. When a Shia Hizbullah shopowner murdered two Sunnis walking in a funeral procession the BBC noted that “Protesters burned down a shop belonging to the alleged shooter, after at least two mourners were killed.” Note the use of the word ‘alleged’.
Jeremy Bowen is the center of this charade. But he is not the first. The BBC’s use of Hizbullah minders and bodyguards goes back several years or more when it covered the Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hizbullah. During that war the BBC passed off fake footage of destroyed houses, faked footage of screaming women and dead children in which the same children and women were moved from location to location in order to inflate the death tolls. But even worse the BBC made sure to position its cameras in such a manner so as to obscure the locations they were shooting from when Hizbullah was launching rockets as civilians inside Israel from just meters away. Thus the BBC actually became part of the Hizbullah war and propaganda machine.

Jeremy Bowen is the center. Note how Hizbullah’s actions are described as ‘civil disobedience’ by the high brow British commentator speaking the Queen’s English. Civil disobedience? 81 people have been murdered by Hizbullah so far in Lebanon. Half of Beirut was taken over. Sunnis and Druze were cleansed from towns and neighborhoods. Indiscriminate shooting caused casualties of civilians. Funeral processions were shot at. Civil disobedience? If it was England would it be called ‘civil disobedience’? Hizbullah has shut down the highways leading from Beirut to the airport. Civil disobedience? If 81 BBC cameramen were shot dead would it be ‘civil disobedience’? If it was Mr. Bowen’s family that was shot down would it be ‘civil disobedience’? If it was London’s Heathrow airport and the BBC couldn’t drive their SUVs up to the entrance to unload their cameras would it be ‘civil disobedience’? If it were a BBC TV station that had been burned rather than Future TV in Lebanon would it be smirked at the way Mr. Thorold made jokes when he examined the destroyed Lebanese station.

The BBC is the greatest mouthpiece of terrorists worldwide. For the BBC a murder becomes ‘disobedience’ and ethnic-cleansing becomes ‘opposition’ and war become ‘fighting’ and murderers become ‘activists’. One can only hope that England will suffer the likes of Hizbullah sooner rather than later so the world can watch as the arrogant commentators at BBC try to describe what it is like when it is British people dying for no reason, being gunned down by a terrorist-mafia like Hizbullah. When it is the Thorold’s and the Bowens dying, then perhaps the BBC will reconsider its devil’s handshake with terror.

Riz Khan, a former commentator for CNN and the BBC and now the anchor for Al-Jazeera English edition noted that “Fox News has led the way in a new trend toward editorializing the television news, he complains. "Fox News started [the trend] by positioning itself as a right-wing service. I was shocked when this started happening. I was taught, in my early years in the BBC almost 20 years ago, that I do not have an opinion. But people love scraps, they love to see people fighting. In America, they're turning to opinion over news.” Remember, the BBC doesn’t have an opinion. On April 9th, 2008 in a story titled ‘ ‘Ambush’ that left SAS trooper dead’ the BBC’s Iraq reporter Paul Wood concluded that “The SAS killed two ‘bombmakers’. They may have created many more.” No opinion? No editorializing. From the perspective of the BBC and Al-Jazeera who see themselves as centrist and who work for Hizbullah this is indeed not an editorial. This is just the facts. Putting things in quotes such as ‘bombmaker’ and ‘ambush’ to cast aspersions on the truth behind how the SAS soldier was killed and who the SAS targeted in the battle is certainly not an editorial. The BBC is not only an editorializing behemoth, where every story is editorialized and every report is full of tears and extreme claims but the BBC is also the actual mouthpiece of murder and terror, an organization devoted to covering up the crimes and excusing the crimes of terrorists and genocidaires. It is an organization whose sole existence is to exploit suffering, create myths, confuse viewers and convince the unconvinced. Its is not a Broadcasting corporation but a propaganda tool. It should be branded a party to terrorism and its funding should be shut off by the government for the funding of the BBC leads directly to the funding of Hizbullah through the Hizbullah affiliated ‘security’ personnel the BBC hires in Lebanon. Jeremy Bowen admitted live on the air that the BBC actually crafts its footage to please Hizbullah. Bowen admits at one point during an online film entitled “Hizbullah withdraws from Beirut”, after noting that the ‘real enemy’ of Lebanon is Israel that “we filmed a group of gunmen pulling a man out of a building. When they saw what we were doing they turned on us and the situation was only diffused when we erased the tapes.” Who were these ‘gunmen’ Mr. Bowen? Mr. Bowen obscures the fact that they were Hizbullah gunmen. When the BBC realized they had inadvertently filmed Hizbullah they erased the tapes. It is the reason that in all the BBC footage of the recent fighting in Beirut that has gone on from May 8th-12th, not one film shows Hizbullah operatives or their deeds and when the aftermath of the Hizbullah murder and destruction spree is shown the group is called the ‘opposition’. This is the BBC. This is the news. This is the British government. This is Hizbullah. How many people have died today in Lebanon because of the BBC broadcasts? How many murdered civilians have they covered up? How many Israeli civilians died because the BBC aided Hizbullah in the Lebanon war, reporting from Israel whenever Hizbullah scored direct hits so that they could find out their aim was correct and at the same time obscuring the Hizbullah launchers in Lebanon. How many? How many are dead everyday in the world because of the actions of the BBC? How many are dead because of Mr. Bowen’s reports, his fabrications, his erasing of tapes to please thugs, his disgusting sniveling attitude. It may be no surprise that Mr. Bowen was given the task by the BBC of doing a video documentary of Israel’s history. That history was described by him as ‘often violent’ and was broken down into ten segments: the 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982 wars, the Egypt-Israel and Oslo peace agreements, the two intifadas, the withdrawal from Gaza and the Second Lebanon war. Mr. Bowen found only violence in Israel’s past. In Lebanon he finds only ‘civil disobedience’ and an ‘opposition’.





To help them we must kill them: a lesson from the UN’s condemnation of Burma
Seth J. Frantzman
May 14th, 2008



A recent video and lecture held at the Willy Brandt Center in Jerusalem (the oddly named: ‘German center where Israelis and Palestinians can meet and discuss coexistence’ which includes the necessary messages about ‘indigenous’ people and ‘rights of minorities’ and paintings by ‘children’ showing Palestinians in prison) documented the ineffectual response of the UN and Kfor to the destruction of Serbian property and monasteries in 2004. But what it highlighted most was the lack of responsibility and accountability international organizations have. It can be summed up thus: If an international organization rapes your daughter or murders your son, who do you turn to? In short international law does not apply to international organizations. Take the issues of refugees. We are told that under international law refugees have either a right of return or right to compensation. In Kosovo there was neither for the 250,000 Serbs cleansed from the province by the UN and Nato. Take the protection of cultural and archeological sites. In Kosovo the UN has watched as 14 century frescoes and ancient Christian monasteries, ones not ever destroyed during a 400 year Ottoman occupation, were destroyed between 1999 and 2008. Sex trafficking and drug trafficking: the UN has and Nato have not been held accountable for the numerous times their own workers have engaged in the mass rape of teenage girls trafficked from Moldova and elsewhere to serve the sexual needs of the KFOR troops. In short NATO and the UN have not observed international law in terms of the responsibilities of an occupying force. The same UN that passes dozens of resolutions a year against the Israeli occupation and has special investigators regarding Israeli rule in the West Bank has not done due diligence in terms of its own accountability in ethnic-cleansing, the creation of refugees, crime, destruction of cultural monuments and the rape of 12 year old girls.
Who has been responsible for the outrages in Kosovo and this complete lack of accountability? Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France. In Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human rights to sell war, Jean Bricmont gives a short history of the Kouchner consensus regarding the need to use ‘human rights’ as an excuse to invade, slaughter, colonize and destroy people. All in the name of saving them. Kouchner is an old activist at this, the founder of Doctors without Borders, has been up to this game for a while. The idea is that nations should intervene to prevent disaster and genocide. Oddly enough such interventions don’t seem to happen when actual genocides are taking place, such as in Rwanda and Sudan. Instead they seem to happen when almost nothing is taking place: such as in Serbia and Haiti. In East Timor the intervention was not ill-timed, but the never-ending nature of it is. In Congo the intervention was during a time of extreme bloodshed, but it seems to have actually encouraged more bloodshed since UN troops have been involved in the arms trade in the country since they have arrived.
The latest cause celebre of Kouchner and many other Europeans and westerners is the need to intervene in Burma. Why Burma? Why not Sudan? International intervention is, according to this theorists, important but it can only be used against certain countries. The countries cannot be ‘European’ and they cannot be Muslim. Ideally they should be countries that are alone, in the sense that they are culturally alone. If they are unique, such as Israel, all the better, because they don’t have large blocs of friends at the UN to give them support.
Andrew Kirkwood of ‘Save the Children’ has been flying around the Irrawady Delta arguing for an invasion of Burma to ‘save the children’(why only the children? Apparently so they can be brought up by Europeans who can teach them about human rights). He has been using his European funded helicopter to fly over the dying Burmese while in the Burma the government has only five helicopters. (this thanks to an international UN sponsored embargo of Burma that has prevented it from buying helicopters lest they be used by the Burmese military). Thus the typical wealthy European humanitarian aid ‘specialist’ is using a helicopter to ‘survey the damage’ rather than helping the dying. Thus white Europeans actually have more helicopters in Burma than the Burmese government, but they won’t be putting those helicopters where their mouths are, just as they won’t using their clean SUVs to help any of the Burmese dead and dying. Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief is clambering for an invasion: “outside donors should find a way to deliver it [aid] anyway [without first consulting the Burmese government.”
In truth what has happened in Burma is a study in how international organizations function. A terrible disaster strikes. The UN shows up with its colonization force: helicopters, planes and SUVs demanding to take over the disaster area and ‘coordinate’ relief using ‘humanitarian experts’. The Burmese government requested that the aid be put in the hands of the government which would distribute it. When the UN found out that the natives would not let them take over part of Burma the UN pulled out the food shipments. Now the international community accuses Burma ‘restricting’ foreign aid and ‘blocking’ foreign aid. But what has Burma blocked? It has blocked white Europeans form tramping around its country and doing to Burma what the UN has done to Serbia, Haiti and East Timor and the Congo. It has stopped tens of thousands of German and Scandinavian foreign aid workers arriving in SUVs, living in special ‘European Aid worker only’ hotels and setting up sex-slave brothels for themselves to satisfy their desires. Doctors without Borders has been expelled by the Burmese government and only a few dozen ‘professional aid workers’ have been given visas. Perhaps the Burmese government objects to the idea that a person should live his or her whole life working in ‘international aid’. Perhaps the Burmese, most of whome have jobs, cannot understand how a European can live his whole life going from one country to another telling foreigners how to live, ordering foreigners to carry aid packages, driving an SUV, flying a special UN plane and living in special compounds and hotels. Perhaps the Burmese, recalling colonialism, do not want legions of Europeans tramping around their country not obeying Burmese law.
So Europeans and westerners have decided that there is another way to deal with a country that won’t let their aid mafia take over the country. In the Herald Tribune on May 14th, Ivo Daalder and Pail Stares, the former of the Brookings institute and the latter of the Council on Foreign Relations have argued that the UN charter expresses a clause that forces governments to have a ‘responsibility to protect’. Thus a government that does not help its own people, to the standards the Europeans desire, must be crushed beneath the boot of the international community. They argues that the “United Nations invoke this collective responsibility to protect the people of Burma…[but] not to resort to the immediate use of force...to use international pressure [i.e sanctions?]…[and take] urgent action.” Reading through the lines one understands what Paul and Ido recommend: Burma must be destroyed so that it can be saved. Embargo. Sanctions. Invasion. International intervention. Colonization. Burma is a threat to its own people. It must therefore be destroyed. Its people must be killed so that they can be saved from the ‘junta’.
Lets pause for one second here. Imagine if the ‘international community’ had decided that the U.S was derelict in its duty after Katrina and had followed the course that Javier and Paul recommend for Burma: forcible aid delivery. It would have been funny to watch UN workers trying to force their way ashore in New Orleans with their SUVs and helicopters. Watching a bunch of Europeans trying to come ashore only to be robbed and gunned down by American gangsters from New Orleans. Only to have their SUVs stolen immediately. It would have joyful to watch. Even the people of New Orleans, despite their abandonment by the local authorities and Louisiana and the Federal government for the better part of a week would not have taken kindly to arrogant Swiss and Norwegian Europeans telling them where they can get food and where they can walk. They would not have taken kindly to a UN colonization scheme-ala-Kosovo. The UN preys on weak nations where the little people dare not resist.
But what of the UN and international role in what has happened in Burma? Two days before the Cyclone hit there was an article in the Tribune about American actors taking up the cause of Burma. They were protesting against the Burmese ‘junta’. One actress held up a sign that declared ‘Hitler lives’ showing the military dictators of Burma. Few of these good natures leftists had evidently read River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U, a relative of U Thant, who argues that the world should first understand Burma and learn about it before condemning it in such obnoxious terms. The international embargo in place against the ‘junta’ has actually resulted in the fact that the government cannot get aid to its own people. Thus it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Europeans boycott Burma. Europeans won’t sell Burma helicopters (but they will sell Iran equipment for nuclear weapons). Then when there is a natural disaster the same leftist Europeans say ‘we must invade Burma to save it.’ One should not, but one must, recognize the historical origin of this. During the years of European intervention which is also called ‘colonialism’ in the 19th century we see that many of the European invasions of many places, especially in Africa, were under the auspices of helping. The Congo was taken over by Belgium to stop the slave trade, especially the Arab slave trade that was then depopulating the Eastern Congo. Belgium was given trusteeship. Belgians immediately began enslaving the Africans. An irony. Today the UN is still in the Congo, once again enslaving and colonizing it. The original British intervention which became the Boer war, and where the first concentration camps were constructed, was under the guise of protecting the ‘human rights’ of British citizens living in the Boer Republics that were then free and independent states in Southern Africa. Thus the history of ‘we must kill them to save them’ is quite old. In the 1990s Nato intervened a number of times in the Yugoslavian wars of succession in order to ‘save’ people. Is Kosovo the model for Burma. The Serbian government was not ‘responsible’ in Kosovo. The UN invaded the province and took it over. After almost 10 years, while 250,000 Serbs were forced to leave and thousands were killed and some 40 monasteries and churches were destroyed, the UN left. There was, of course, no ‘UN responsibility to protect’
Where does one go after the UN has invaded your country and it refuses to protect you. What does one do when it turns out the UN troops are raping young girls and selling guns as they do in the Congo? Who does one turn to when the international community breaks its own international law and is no longer protecting the country it has taken over as a steward under the excuse of helping defend ‘human rights’? All one can do is reach for their rifle the way the American Revolutionary War leaders did. All one can do is follow the example of Sam Adams and Patrick Henry (‘give me liberty or give me death). The world should not fall for this scam that people need to be invaded and colonized in order to be saved. The world has done nothing to help in the Sudan where a real genocide cries out for justice. But here in Burma we have something that is easy to hate. But Europeans need, for once in their lives, to treat others the way they want to be treated. When riots erupted in Paris no one suggested that France should be invaded because it was derelict in its ‘responsibility to protect’ its citizens from rioting Muslims.
Europeans must be stopped. Their UN must be stopped. Their EU must be stopped. Their obsession with telling the world how to live must be stopped. Their knee-jerk reaction that they know what is best must be stopped. No country deserves the UN. No people deserve the white SUVs illegally parking on their streets and the rich UN workers speaking in arrogant tones in coffee shops. No one deserves it. The only way to oppose the UN is to oppose it as a colonizer, to oppose it the way one opposes any form of tyranny. The Burmese people would be well placed to inform the UN “we do not want your SUVs, we do not want your suits and your cell phones. We want your aid. Your food aid. That is all.” In the U.S State of Maine there is a bumper sticker that says “Welcome to Mane, now go home.” Welcome to Burma. Now go back to the Brookings Institute. Now go back to Geneva. Go back or you may find yourself face down in a rice patty, like all the dead from the cyclone, the dead who cannot be rescued because Europe has embargoed Burma for so long.



Is Islam a cult?
Seth J. Frantzman
May 14th, 2008

When police raided a 'cult' in Texas they found child marriage and rape and hundreds of children were confiscated. They found that some of the teenage girls had been pregnant and that they had been forced into arranged marriages. They found that young girls had married older men. They were polygamous. When the girls appeared in an interview on Foxnews the commentators made fun over their 'hokey' dress and psychologists noted that they talked in a bland robotic manner and kept their eyes down. America was outraged. These people, it seemed, were easy to hate. There weren't very many of them, just a thousand or so. They were a 'cult'. The state had no problem putting the boot of government down the throats of these people, shipping their children off by the truckload to unknown destinations where legions of social workers could have their way with them. No doubt the members of this cult will not be seeing their little girls again. The 'robotic' housewives in their 'stupid looking' clothing will, apparently, be allowed by the government to return to their husbands, if those husbands avoid jail time.

But when no one realized while all the late night talk shows and pundits and comedians were making fun and lynching this cult was the similarities between it and a much larger cult called 'Islam'. This Texas based cult and its treatment of women is no different than the subjugation practiced by Islam. Polygamy is the same. The 'stupid clothing' is the same. The shamefaced, downward looking meek and brainwashed women are the same. One has only to turn on the television of the latest protests in Lebanon to see the women of Hizbullah, all swathed in black, their necks and cheeks bulging out because of the tightness of their 'hijabs' which cover every inch of their body. Islam practices child marriage and young girls are raped across the Islamic world when they are sold into marriage by their families.

American leftists have an easy time hating people they call 'Christian', in this case the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Europeans have an easy time as well. The Mirror in England described the case as "Horror of Texas Child Sex cult." The mirror goes on to explain "According to court documents, girls born into the cult were married to much older men as soon as they reached puberty. And boys were groomed to perpetuate the cycle…The startled women and girls were all dressed in ankle-length pioneer dresses, their long hair identically braided …They knew nothing of the world beyond the locked iron gates of the compound…There was no access to televisions, newspapers or magazines…Neither the children nor their mothers knew how to use crayons given to them by social workers after they were rescued…They were physically sick after their first meal on the outside because their stomachs couldn't handle processed food or rich sauces..The pioneer-style dresses, worn over long handstitched underwear all year round are part of the cult's strict dress code. The women spent their days tilling the fields and quilting and are thought to have stood by as the men preyed on the younger girls."

Helen Pfluger noted that "They are like aliens - or we are like aliens to them…It was like talking to people from 1870."

Lets recount. This 'cult' is disturbing not merely because the girls are married at a young age. It is disturbing because of the full length clothing and the fact that women work in the field and sow and that there is a 'strict dress code' and they can't eat processed food and they don't watch TV or read newspapers or leave the compound. They are living in the 1870s. But Islam is living in the 8th century. Islam has a 'strict dress code'. Muslim women are forced to practice 'purdah' veiling and are expected to remain inside the family home as much as possible. In Egypt is it said of a woman that she should leave the house only three times: to marry, when her parents die and when she is laid in the grave. Yet as has been exposed previously, the west loves Islam. Islam is exotic. Its clothing is 'modest'. It is romantic. Western women enjoy donning the headscarf in the name of women. Liberal leftist women will gladly cover their bodies in order to meet 'conservative' and 'traditional' Muslim men so as not to 'offend Muslim sensibilities'. But the liberal will not don 'pioneer' dress when meeting with members of the Fundamentalist Church of LDS. They won't wear a bonnet when visiting the Texas 'compound'.

Why? Why is one 'strict dress code' in Islamic societies called romantic but a similar 'strict dress code' in Texas is called a 'cult'. What of Texas Muslims. Why are they not rounded up for marrying girls at a young age and keeping women in the house and forcing women to wear full length burkas? Why aren’t they written up in newspapers with lurid accounts of how they 'live in the 1870s' and 'are like aliens'?
Islam is a cult. It is more of a cult and a more dangerous cult than the one in Texas because it has 1.4 billion members. It is more dangerous because it preaches worldwide Jihad and murder in the name of its 'religion'. It controls 30 countries. Imagine if the Fundamentalist Church of the LDS controlled dozens of countries. Would the leftists suddenly find it exotic? Would it suddenly be respected? Would we suddenly be afraid of 'offending' its sensibilities? The next time someone tries to trick you into thinking Islam is different than the Texas cult just pretend every 'Mohammed' is Warren Jeffs (the 'prophet' of the Texas Cult) and every one of those 'traditional' and 'modest' Muslim women is wearing pioneer dress. Only by understanding Islam this way can we understand its threat and the dreadful societies it has created.

Terra Incognita 34 Senegal, Lonely Planet Egypt and U.S immigration

Terra Incognita
Issue 34
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

May 11th, 2008

1) Senegal's greatest leader: Abdoulaye Wade In May of 2008 the President of Senegal stood up to the U.N and threatened to sue its food program for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars. He has implicated the UN in the recent world food crises. A close examination shows the evils the UN has perpetrated in Africa are much deeper than Mr. Wade realized. It is, in fact, a neo-colonialist enterprise that is destroying Africa.

2) Book review: Lonely Planet's Conversion guide to Islam: Lonely Planet’s guide to Egypt is one cliché after another. Egypt’s Copts live in coexistence with its Muslims. Western women are encouraged to be modest so as to avoid being perceived as immoral and thus sexually harrased by Muslim men. But if it is the western women who are immoral than why do the ‘moral’ and ‘conservative’ Muslim men harass them? A conservative man does not harass women. In fact Islamic society is a liberal society. Islam doesn’t hate America because America is immoral. It is the opposite. Islam is immoral and it hates the world because the world has true conservatives who put the lie to the Islamic claim of being ‘moral’, ‘modest’ and ‘conservative’.

3) The Secret: Ode to the American immigrant: American immigrants are the heart and soul of America and they always have been. America acts as a force multiplier for them. Thus one Italian-American will produce in his lifetime ten times what he would have produced had he been born in Italy. America could have beaten Nazi Germany in World War Two simply by sending American Germans to fight their countrymen. 60 million Germans under Hitler would have been no match for the ingenuity, hybrid vigor, and potential of the millions of Germans and their ancestors resident in the U.S in 1941. Had Barack Obama stayed in Kenya he would today be hacking up neighboring villagers over an ethnic dispute. Mexicans who protest about a ‘day without a Mexican’ should also hold a ‘day without a Mexican remittance’ for Mexico. The Mexican economy would collapse without the industrial potential of America’s Mexicans. The world claims the U.S will collapse. But that day will only come when the world collapses, for America is made up of the world. And 300 million Americans are more industrious, creative, intelligent, interesting and honest than all their ancestors and kinsmen living abroad today. Sounds arrogant. The world needs to hear more of it after America has had to listen to the world’s peoples waving their fingers at the U.S for the last thirty years.





Senegal's greatest leader: Abdoulaye Wade
May 11th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman

Abdoulaye Wade, the current president of Senegal, was born in 1926 when the country was a French Colony. It gained independence in 1960 and for 40 years the Socialist party governed the country. During that time Wade earned two doctorates and became the country's main opposition figure, a rarity in Africa where opposition can usually result in imprisonment of death. In 1974 he founded an opposition political party and finally in 2000 he led a coalition of opposition parties to victory. A Muslim and pan-Africanist Mr. Wade has long taken an interest in Human Rights and in inter-faith dialogue. His wife, apparently, is a Catholic. Upon his victory he noted that " "This is a day of liberation; this is a day of liberation. It is the dawn of a new era, and that is the most important thing," Upon being sworn in he noted that " "The first great objective of my political life was to get rid of a system in Senegal. Midnight has struck, the system is dead,"

But Mr. Wade, a tall, skinny, lanky individual with a shaved head and what seem to be permanently disfigured chapped lips, never realized that his greatest challenge would not be ridding his country of the corruption of the Socialist party, or surviving in opposition. His greatest challenge would come in May of 2008 when he decided to liberate the world from an even greater scourge than socialism: the U.N. On May 8th Mr. Wade threatened to sue to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) if it did not return costs deducted from programs intended to help African nations cope with rising food prices. Wade appeared in a special broadcast on TV denouncing the UN and FAO as "bottomless pit of money largely spent on its own functioning with very little effective operations on the ground… I told them 'If you carry on I will take you to court. You must repay the 20 percent of the money collected in our names… They deduct 20 percent of the money collected in Africa's name to run the FAO. I told them those who created the FAO should fund its running costs."

If that had been it Mr. Wade might be seen as merely issuing an outburst. But he went further. He accused the FAO of being a 'waste of money' and said it was 'largely to blame' for the world food crises. He dared to say "the current situation is largely its (the FAO’s) failure and the cries of alarm will not help at all.” In response the UN brought out one of its Europeans, Nick Parsons, a son wealthy Europeans who, like most UN workers, has never worked in his life and whose job was reserved for him along with hundreds of thousands of other Europeans at birth so that he would never have to get a job. " As an organization we have no comment at all" Another UN worker, speaking anonymously said " At a time of troubles in several countries because of the food crisis, it is easy for governments to scapegoat the FAO.”The organization is “far from perfect, but as the report on governance said, it is indispensable, and if it didn’t exist it would have to be invented,” But the African nuisance Wade would not go away " “This time, I’m going further, we must scrap it,” The FAO has an annual budget of $433mn and employs more than 3,000 people, mostly Europeans.

In taking on the UN Mr. Wade is assaulting the very heart of neo-colonialism, the 'colonialism with a friendly face' whereby a bloated organization named the UN and its NGO allies tries to ruthlessly control and exploit the world. Senegal is only the second country in the world to stand up to the UN. In 2005 and 2006 Eritrea tried to rid itself of the UN. President Isaias Afewerki tried expelling European UN troops and then he tried stopping food shipments to them. But they would not go away. The flew in food for themselves from airports they controlled in Eritrea, violating not only international law but also the notion of sovereignty and thus showing the lie to the U.Ns pledge to respect national borders. In dealing with the U.N the small nation of Eritrea gave the U.N 10 days to leave its country. The colonialist secretary General of the U.N at the time, Kofi Annan said the decision was 'UNacceptable'. Eritrea responded that the UN was UNwanted.

Mr. Wade is a hero. A hero because he fought socialism. A hero for being an opposition leader. But he is a true hero because he fought the UN. It is the leaders of small nations that are increasingly realizing the threat the UN poses to national identity, sovereignty, human rights, food, and humanity. They are realizing not only that the UN is wasteful, but that the UN violates their airspace and borders, colonizes their country, sets up brothels for itself, has its own hotels and its own cantonments where only its members can go. African nations are not new to this treatment, given the long history of colonialism. But Africans are leading the struggle against the UN. In the Congo it has was revealed on April 28th, 2008 that UN 'peacekeepers' traded in gold, ivory and arms with rebel groups. The 'peacekeepers' in question were from Pakistan. It turns out the UN did not investigate the incidents, which took place over five years, because of fears of 'offending' Pakistan and other Muslim nations. Jean Marie-Guehenno, the head of UN peacekeeping in Congo noted that "We have shared the report with the concerned troop-contributing country and I am confident they will take the required action. And this issue is closed." Monuc (United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo), Alan Doss, dismissed their evidence as untrustworthy. "Militia leaders are militia leaders," he said. "They always have their interests, if you will. All I can say is this investigation didn’t confirm that."
Alan Doss's life story reads like most European born UN workers. Even the UN admits, "Alan Doss has spent his entire working life in the service of the United Nations." He is currently the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Liberia and head of the UN peace keeping mission (UNMIL) with the rank of Under Secretary General. Immediately prior to his assignment to Liberia, he was the Principal Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Côte d’Ivoire where he coordinated the work of the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission (ONUCI) in the areas of human rights, rule of law, civilian police and elections. His previous post was as Deputy Special Representative in the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and concurrently United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative where he provided oversight for the reintegration of war affected populations. Until his appointment in Sierra Leone he held the position of Director of the United Nations Development Group (UNDG), which was set up by Secretary General Kofi Annan to strengthen coordination among the UN organisations dealing with development under the leadership of the Administrator of UNDP. He managed the design and implementation of reforms aimed to improve the performance of UN operational activities around the world. During that period he worked also on developing an integrated follow-up for the UN global conferences of the nineties, which led at the end of the decade to the Millennium Development Goals. Prior to his UNDG assignment, he was Director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) European Office in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was charged with strengthening UNDP’s outreach and fund raising work in Western Europe, focusing on UNDP’s advocacy for human development. He concurrently represented the UNDP at the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD in Paris where he was member of the group that drew up the DAC’s landmark study on conflict, peace and development cooperation in 1997. He had previously served as United Nations Resident Coordinator and Regional Representative of the UNDP in Bangkok, Thailand. At the same time, he was Director of the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO), in charge of United Nations assistance to 300,000 displaced Cambodian people on the Thai-Cambodia border. During this period he was also the UN representative to the inter-governmental Mekong River Committee and worked actively on its reconstitution as a Commission and the re-admission of Cambodia. Earlier appointments included posts as UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Benin and the Democratic Republic of Congo responsible for UN operational activities in those countries. In 1979, he had been appointed as Deputy Resident Representative of UNDP in China with the opening of the first international development cooperation programme and office in that country. In 1977 he had developed the first UNDP cooperation programme for Vietnam. Other country assignments included Niger and Kenya and at UNDP Headquarters in New York where he served in the Africa and Asia regional offices and in the Administrative Management Bureau. Alan Doss was born and brought up in Cardiff, Wales in the UK. He graduated from the London School of Economics.
This is the life of the new colonialist. This is the new imperialist. This humble, non-descript person is responsible, like Eichmann, for the murder of millions the world over, from Cambodia to Rwanda to the Congo. Some 5 million have died while the UN has occupied Eastern Congo.
Jean Marie-Guehenno, the UN's undersecretary for peacekeeping operations, is French. He has never worked in his life. He went to the Ecole nationale in Paris and then worked at the Ministry of Defense in France. He has worked for the UN since 1999. When told about the fact that UN workers traded guns for gold and helped Hutu genocidaires kill more Tutsis he said "this issue is closed." It is not closed for the hundreds of Tutsis who will be massacred tomorrow.
An investigation by The Times found that at least two UN officials had to leave the country after getting local women pregnant. Sixty-six peacekeepers were repatriated and six civilian staff suspended when charges of misconduct came to light. The latest allegations involve Pakistani peacekeepers in the eastern town of Mongbwalu, who are accused of receiving gold from the Front des Nationalistes et Intégrationnistes (FNI) militia in return for providing them with weapons to guard mines. Other soldiers around the town of Goma are also accused of direct dealings with Hutu militiamen responsible for the Rwandan genocide. They bought gold and drugs from the Forces Démocratiques de la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) - made up of the remnants of the Interahamwe - and flew a helicopter into Virunga national park, where they swapped ammunition for ivory.
The UN has raped and murdered its way through Congo for 8 years. It has helped kill 5 million people. And Europeans leftists are at the center of this genocide. Renewed colonialism of the worst kind. One can watch and sit by. Or one can act. The UN is a threat to global civilization. It is a threat to everyone. It food programes are causing famine on a massive scale. It has, of late, attempted to destroy Burma through sanctions to the extent that the destruction caused by the recent cyclone should be put squarely on the shoulders of the UN. The UN to this day refuses to send food aid to Burma under the excuse that it is being confiscated. This is an odd tone for the UN to take. In the Congo they traded guns for gold. They set up refugee camps for the Hutu mass murderers. They trained the Hutus and provided them with guns. 5 million have died. Now they are angry that food is being confiscated?


Book review: Lonely Planet's Conversion guide to Islam
May 9th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman


Few people know that there is an Atlas of women. The atlas contains most of the things one would imagine: maps of literacy rates, marriage age and rights to abortion. The atlas also contains maps illustrating legal discrimination again women. Unsurprisingly Saudi Arabia, the beacon of Islam, the home of Mecca, does not rank well. It has the most discriminatory laws against women in the world. Women are married at a young age and they are behind the world in terms of literacy and education. So be it. Saudi is not far behind other Muslim countries and a few non-Muslim ones in Africa in this respect. Women simply don’t exist in that society. They are nameless, faceless beasts used by men so as to procreate and create more men. They have no role in society. Few work. They can’t travel without permission from male relatives. If they are raped four witnesses must attest to it or they are accused of adultery. This is Saudi. This is the country that no liberal will protest because liberals prefer easier, poorer targets such as Myanmar (Burma). Saudi. The country where there are special roads for Muslims leading to Mecca on which non-Muslims are barred. Saudi. The country that imports millions of foreign workers to pump its oil and do its construction. The country that beheads those foreign workers when they step out of line. The country that keeps those workers in concentration camps and of course denies them any rights whatsoever. Saudi. America’s closest ally. Europe’s best friend. But so be it. Saudi. The country where all 19 Sept. 11 hijackers came from. Recall what the liberals said after 9/11. It was America’s fault. America’s foreign policy caused it. And what did the liberals also say. They said ‘Muslims hate us because they view our society as opulent and immoral.’ Opulent and Immoral. Those were our sins.

The Women’s Atlas reveals something else interesting. It shows the path of sex-trafficking in women. It shows the countries from which the women are taken as slaves and their destinations, the black holes from which they never return. Where are the women from? The Philippines, Eastern Europe, Russia. Those are the main supplies, along with India, Nepal, Thailand and Cambodia. Where are the women sent as slaves? Among other places every arrow points to Saudi and the UAE. Saudi. Land of morality. Remember. The 19 hijackers hated America because it was Opulent and Immoral. But it is Saudi that is the destination of hundreds of thousands of sex slaves every year imported from around the world. It is the Saudi men who frequent brothels throughout the world and who sun tan on the French Riviera and own posh cars. Who is opulent? Who is immoral? A country that imports women as slavery to be sold as chattel for sex and then murdered. That is an immoral country. Europe is immoral. It also imports whores. To be sure. But Saudi and Europe have this in common. Each are festering cess-pools replete with dungeons underground for the female slaves that their societies need. Each is a black hole for women. America too is full of immorality. Fine. But this immorality unites us. Compared to Saudi, American ‘opulence’ is but a drop in the bucket. So let’s pause for a moment. What if they didn’t hate us because we were immoral? What might be another reason? Let’s think.

While we think, let’s examine another piece of evidence. The Lonely Planet Guide to Egypt. The authors are almost all women including Gadi Farfour, Siona Jenkins and Leanne Logan. Farfour has an East European mother and Egyptian father and, true to all the women who enter the Islamic black hole, she is a good Egyptian nationalist. Siona, a Canadian, came to Egypt to study Arabic and has lived in the country 10 years. Although a good liberal in Canada condemning conservatives and fighting for women’s rights and minority rights, in Egypt she covers her body from head to toe, is a good nationalist and a good conservative Muslim. Leanne is from Australia.

On page 93 regarding ‘Women Travelers’ the guide informs us that “Egyptians are conservative, especially about matters concerning sex and women…a large number of Egyptians see western women as sex-obsessed and immoral….premarital sex is taboo in Egypt…it is the exception rather than the rule-and that goes for men as well as women.” On page 94 under ‘safety tips for women’ the guide tells women to ‘wear a wedding band’ in order to avoid unwanted attention from Egyptian men and for women to ‘not respond to an obnoxious comment from a man-act as if you didn’t hear it.’ ‘be careful in crowds…it is not unusual for crude things to happen behind you.’ ‘On public transport sit next to a woman…in the countryside be conservative in what you wear…be very careful about behaving in a flirtatious manner…riding in front of a man on a camel is simply asking for trouble…Along the Mediterranean coast and in oases pools, you’ll have to swim in shorts and a T-shirt, at the very minimum, and even then you’ll attract a flock of male onlookers. Egyptian women rarely go swimming…when they do, they swim fully clothed, scarf and all…You may find it handy to learn the Arabic for ‘don’t touch me’…getting to know an Egyptian woman is easier said than done. You won’t find them in cafes or teahouses.”

Under the ‘what to wear’ section on page 95 we learn ‘wearing shorts and a tight T-shirt on the street is, in some people’s eyes, confirmation of the worst views of western women…if you’re alone or with other women, the amount of harassment you get will be directly related to how you dress: the more skin exposed, the more harassment…baggy T-shirts and loose cotton trousers or long skirts won’t make you sweat as much as you think and will protect you from unwanted comments.”
When discussing the town of Nuweiba in Sinai on page 499 the guide claims “topless sunbathing is gaining ground among visitors to Nuweiba, especially Israelis staying in Tarabin. You should think twice before taking part in what is little more than a strip show for the local men.” One might wonder why Israeli women don’t sunbathe topless in Israel but wait to get to a Muslim country in order to do so. But more importantly is the tone of the guide, the way in which the liberal suddenly describes topless sunbathing as a strip tease. But is it not the same thing in the West? When the first women began bathing topless was it not also just a strip tease for the men. In the West however the Liberal calls it ‘independence’ and ‘our bodies’. The guide does not recommend any of the beaches visited by the Israeli heathens but it does recommend the one European colonized beach in Sinai, the Basata camp, which it describes as “ecologically minded…Owner Sherif Ghamrawy is an environmentalist…produce is organically grown.” None of this is true, in fact the camp is a resort for Egyptian men and their mostly German wives and is notorious for being infested with German neo-nazis.

Recall that the guide told its readers that Egypt is a conservative country and that we should not reinforce Egyptian Muslim stereotypes of westerners being ‘sex obsessed’. But when one reads the rest one must question who is sex-obsessed. Who is doing the harassing. Who is it that flocks around women bathing and gropes them on buses and offers them camel rides to grope them. Who says the crude comments? Muslims. Muslims. That is who. A truly conservative society is not based on the ‘morality’ of keeping women locked up and hidden while men do as they please. How can one be ‘conservative’ if the men have no responsibility. Islam is not a conservative religion. It is a liberal religion. It is the highest form of liberalism because its hypocrisy creates a society of sheep like women who are all hidden from view and toe the nationalist religious line. The men do as they please. Recall the guide told us that sex before marriage is taboo. But it is not taboo for men. All these ideas of Islam being ‘conservative’ are a lie. The great irony is that leftist liberal western women hate conservatives in the U.S and love Islamic ‘conservatives’. But the deeper pat of this irony is that theirs is not so much a hypocrisy because Muslims are not conservative. Their religion is only binding on women. It is a religion that is directed solely at women and requests nothing of men, no responsibility, nothing. It is a religion of men, for men and by men. That is a liberal religion. It is the ‘me’ religion, where I, the human become the center. It is not so different than the Communist religion, the one that replaces god with the state, except in this case god is replaced with the man, the ‘me’ who does whatever he wants whenever he wants and enslaves the other half of humanity, ‘women’. This is Islam. Is there anything more liberal? The greatest liberalism in the west is the cesspool of sex slavery, prostitution, stripping and porn. It is the place where the ‘me’ is at its highest for it is the part of the west that revolves around pleasure and the male. It is a place where humanity is reduced to flesh, to beasts. This is no different than the gulag, for the reduction of humans to beasts takes place both in the liberal society and the Communist society. This is the farthest one can come from faith and conservatism because faith asks man to treat eachother equally before god, it does not allow for the reduction of humans to slaves, to animals, to meat. So we see in Islam that it is not the west that is sex-obsessed, but Islam. Just as Saudi, the most Muslim state, imports sex slaves, we see that in Egypt the idea of the conservative lies, the Islamist spends his time watching porn and assaulting western women. He hates the west, but it is the women of the west he desires. What would he do without them. He would have to live up to that false taboo and be a virgin at marriage. But no Egyptian man is a virgin at marriage. There are 40 million Egyptian men. With millions of western female tourists coming every year one cannot believe seriously that the men are virgins at marriage, not with such a supply of women.

But Lonely Planet is not through with its propaganda. Lonely planet also explains that “for many Egyptians, both men and women, the role of a woman is specifically defined: she is the mother and the matron of the household.” This is how liberalism now explains discrimination against women and how ‘housewife’ is described. But when liberals talk about traditional Mormon families suddenly they find suppressed women and a conservative society with negative connotations rather than ‘defined roles’ or ‘different roles’.

Lonely planet explains that “Generally speaking Christians and Muslims in Egypt enjoy a more or less easy coexistence. Though western newspapers from time to time run stories claiming that Copts are a persecuted minority, virtually all prominent Christians in Egypt insist they are neither persecuted not a minority. Intermarriage between Christians and Muslims is forbidden.” If there is such wonderful utopian liberalistic coexistence then why is intermarriage forbidden?

If one is not convinced yet that Islam is not a ‘moral’ religion and Muslims didn’t attack America because they view America as immoral, one must only need one more piece of evidence. An article in the Times of London explained ‘A hidden world in which Asian men “groom” young white girls for sex has been exposed with the jailing yesterday of two men for child-abuse offences. Zulfqar Hussain, 46, and Qaiser Naveed, 32, from east Lancashire, were each jailed for five years and eight months after exploiting two girls aged under 16 by plying them with alcohol and drugs before having sex with them.’ In this case ‘Asian’ should be read ‘Muslim’. In England ‘Asian’ refers to the Pakistani and Indian communities as well as people from East Asia. The article also noted that ‘Parents have complained that in parts of the country with large Asian communities white girls as young as 12 are being targeted for sex by older Asian men yet the authorities are unwilling to act because of fears of being labelled racist.’ A Labour MP names Ann Cryer said that young Asian men were caught between two cultures having been brought up in a Western society in families while retaining the cultural values of the Asian sub-continent.
She said: “The family and cultural norms of their community means they are expected to marry a first cousin or other relative back in a village in Mirapur or wherever the family comes from. Therefore, until that marriage is arranged they look out for sex.
“At the point in their lives when they are ready for this sort of activity, Asians cannot go to Asian girls because it would be a terrible breach of the honour of the community and their family to have sex with an Asian girl before marriage.” She said that the reason Asian men targeted very young white girls was because older white girls knew that a relationship with an Asian youth was unlikely to last as the community would seek an arranged marriage with someone from the Asian sub- continent.
The article noted that ‘campaigners claim that hundreds of young girls are already being passed around men within the Asian community’ Ms Cryer added: “I think there is a problem with the view Asian men generally have about white women. Their view about white women is generally fairly low. They do not seem to understand that there are white girls as moral and as good as Asian girls.”
Listen to the mantra again. The men come from a ‘conservative’ and ‘traditional’ background and are supposed to wait until marriage for sex. They can’t have sex with women in their own community so they ‘must’ have sex with non-Muslim women. They can’t ‘dishonour’ Muslim women. They view western women as ‘low’ and thus immoral. But who makes these western women immoral. When 46 year old Hussain, the conservative honourable Muslim, drugged a 16 year old girl and raped her and then passed her to his friend Naveed, another Muslim, who made this girl ‘low’ and ‘immoral’. Who was the dishonourable one?
Think hard about it. Was it the western woman? Or was it the Muslim male. Who is the ‘immoral’ one. But recall the Muslims view western women negatively, just as Egyptians do, and we are supposed to not live up to their stereotypes. But Muslims have created these stereotypes. It is Islam that imports sex slaves. It is Islam that had the harems. It is Islam that deported 6 million African black women from East Africa between the 8th and 19th centuries and used them for sex and then discarded them like trash. It is Islam that deported hundreds of thousands of sex slaves from India from the 12th to 19th centuries, a trade that only interdicted by the Sikhs in the 18th century when Sikh began to defend the honour of Hindu women from this slave trade. It is Islam and the Ottoman empire that levied a ‘daughte tax’ on Eastern Europe, taking young girls from Christian communities under imperial rule every year for the royal harem. It is Islamic slave raiders who took hundreds of thousands of slaves from the Ukraine and Georgia before the 20th century to sell them in the slave markets of Anatolia. It is Islam today that still imports sex slaves from disparate places such as South Sudan, India, Nepal, Phillipines, armenia and Eastern Europe.
So which is more moral, the country that imports the sex slaves or the countries that do not? Which religion is more more, the one that dominates in a country where women cannot go outside without being harrased by men or the one that dominates in a country where women can go outside without being crudely groped by men? Where is the morality in Islam? Where is this ‘conservative’ society. There is nothing conservative in Islam. This is why the Muslim men fit in to English society so well. Muslim men are liberal in their sexual behavious and so are English women. Of course Muslim women cannot go meet English men, the Muslim women must guard the ‘honour’ of her family lest she be murdered by her own male relatives for ‘dishonoring’ the family. But it should be the other way around, Everytime a Muslim man is not a virgin at marriage he should be murdered by his own family because he has not upheld the family ‘honour’. Every time he goes to a strip club or hits on a non-Muslim woman or goes to a prostitute, every time he talks about his ‘moral’ and ‘conservative culture’ and whines about his inability to find women among his community (the same women he himself locks at home).
Morality is something that is binded to everyone equally. A man upholds the family honor not by murdering his sister but instead by not groping women. A man upholds his own honour by not raping 16 year old girls when he is 46. A man upholds the family honour by not harrasing women. A woman is also bound by this honour. But liberalism would have us believe that oly women must adhere to this honour. Liberalism tells us Egypt is ‘romantic’ and ‘exotic’ and that Arabic is ‘beautiful’. Liberalism and feminism tells us that women should go about topless in their country and cover themselves head to toe in another country, that conservatives and nationalism are bad at home but they are positive abroad. The main message of liberalism is this hypocrisy. The main message of Islam is immorality and liberalism.
Conservativism only exists in non-Muslim societies. It exists in the west in the form of Orthodox Jews and Fundamentalist Christians. It exists among the Sikhs and Hindus. It exists among the Afrikaners and Serbs. It cannot exist among Muslims or liberals because those two religions believe that there is no personal responsibility. Responsibility is the bedrock of conservative behaviour. A Muslim cannot be conservative because the Muslim religion argues that a man may have four wives and that he may beat his wives (as only a coward does), and that he may rape his female slaves. Inequality is the mother of liberalism and Islam. Conservatives universally beleve only in euqality between people, not between peoples, not between religions, but between two people. Equality under the law. The law is conservative. The idea of law is conservative. Rape is not conservative. ‘Grooming’ 16 year old girls for sex is not conservative. Murdering one’s sister because she trangressed the family ‘honour’ is not conservative. Groping a woman is not conservative. TO be sure the western conservative cannot live up to his way of life all the time. But he does not expect more from others than from himself. If he goes to a strip club he must not say the strippers are ‘immoral’ for he has engaged their immorality and he has played a part in it. This is the central difference between Islam and conservatism. Islam gropes western women and harrases them and imports them as prostitutes. Then Islam views them as low and immoral, when it is Islam that contrbuted to their degredation. Islam sees itself as not being part of this because it has no responsibility. It simply does not have the concept. Neither does liberalism. Liberalism does not accept the notion of personal responsibility which is why, for instance, it champions murderers and gives them free legal counsel.
Responsibility. When something is Immoral it is immoral for all. There is no one sided morality where a ‘conservative’ Muslim in a ‘traditional’ community can have sex with a 16 year old girl and then condemn his daughter for being ‘immoral’ because she stayed out after he curfew.

The secret: Ode to the American immigrant
Seth J. Frantzman
May 11th, 2008

In the now famous booklet and TV special, The Secret, the authors argue that by willing something, by thinking good thoughts one can be more successful. In Bloody Foreigners Robert Winder argues that immigration has played a major part in English history and thus the recent anti-immigrant feelings of the English are both wrong-headed and not historically logical.
But lets face it, England is not really a nation of immigrants, unless one goes back to the 8th to 11th centuries at which time it becomes one (due to the invasions of Normans, Angles, Saxons and others). America is the nation of Immigrants and there is no more symbolic statement of that then the quote found on the Statue of Liberty:
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your
huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Emma Lazarus, 1883

The first people in America were immigrants, albeit between 11,000 and 40,000 years ago from what is now Siberia. Later, so it is surmised, a few Vikings found themselves dashed ashore in Labrador. It was not until the 16th and 17th centuries that the first European settlers wandered ashore to stay with the founding of St. Augustine (1565), Jamestown (1607), New Sweden (1638) and New Amsterdam (1624). In the exceedingly detailed and hard to read, but nevertheless brilliant, Albion’s Seed, David Hackett examines the first four waves of British immigrants. In 1620 the first Puritan settlers arrived in Massachusetts. Between 1629 and 1641 some 20,000 more would arrive. Their origins were in East Anglian parts of England (Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and East Sussex). From 1680 to 1725 the areas around Pennsylvania were settled by people from the Midlands in England, a number of whome were Quakers. The American South was settled by English gentry, black slaves and indentured white servants. The early ‘frontier’ in Appalachia was settled by Scots and other people from northern England and Ireland.

Once the large scale English immigration subsided the slave trade brought millions of Africans to America, almost entirely West Africans. These groups: Native-Americans, Africans, Southern whites, Scottish frontiersmen and Yankee Puritans would give America numerous cultural influences. They were the origin of WASP culture, the so-called ‘Anglo Saxon Protestant elites’ who came to dominate American business and government. These were the freemasons and tradesmen who made up early America’s bugeoning economy and whose economic interests and love of liberty led directly to the Boston Tea-Party and the revolution. Theirs was the lot of modesty, hard work, humility, penny-pnching industriousness. And religious freedom. Nothing is more enduring to American culture than African-Americans and their importance. A million Americans died in the Civil War that was primarily fought to set them free. They were at the heart of the cultural awakening, New Left and Freedom rides of the 1960s. Their music, riots and leaders from Malcolm X to Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers are indelibly etched on the soul of America. They have been considered America’s classic ‘minority’ for so long that the fear of their losing out to Hispanics as a minority group has led the U.S census to classify Hispanics as ‘white’. The Natives, who fought a losing battle for their lands from the 17th century to the late 19th left a great mark. Their heroism, love of the land and beauty are much a figure of America and its landscape. Their names are are ever present, from the Apache Helicopter to the Winnebego. Who can forget the input of the Southern gentry. Forgiving their slave owning and the KKK one must not forget that they gave America its ideas. They gave America both the Federalist Papers and anti-federalism. Who else would have defeated Hamilton’s vision of a Napoleonic America or Adams’ vision of an America forever stuck to the side of England. Their legacy lives on in the U.S military that is primarily dominated by Southern men who have made up the military elites of America from the time of George Washington and Harry Lee (ancestor of Robert E. Lee) to William Westmoreland. What other culture could have produced the Patton’s, one of which was a friend of John Singleton Mosby and another of which was the famous American General (the Patton’s were Scottish however). And what would America be without the Frontier created by those early Scottish settlers, many of whome intermarried with the local Native-Americans (to the extent that the Cherokee nation had huge numbers of Scottish-Indian children by the time it was expelled from Georgia and moved to Oklahoma).

Once we do away with the importance of the pre-revolutionary immigration waves we encounter the important immigration waves of the 19th century. Italians, who brought food and the mafia. Irish, who brought Catholicism, beer and a dedication to policing. Germans who brought such a dedication to farming that they form the largest ancestroy groups in 20 mid-west American states. The Chinese who built the railroads. The Japanese. The Jews. The Polish. The Russians. The Dutch and Scandanivians. The French, who today form the largest ancestry group in a dozen American counties, all bordering Canada. It was the immigrants who brought radical European ideas to America, such as Communism, Socialism and Anarchism.

Moving on to the 20th century we encounter large immigrations from Asia and India. But most importantly we encounter large scale Hispanic immigration which has resulted in Mexicans being the largest ancestry group in four Western states. Mexicans have brought a renewel of the American immigration culture to the U.S. In 2004 there were 34 million foreign born Americans of whome some 8 million are Mexican born.

American immigrants have rarely, if ever, been the cream of the crop of the country from which they have come. Emma Lazarus, an American-born Sephardie Jew understood this too well when she penned the words “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” She understood that the cream, which is already at the top, does not rise. It just sits there. Cream doesn’t rise to the top. Instead it turns out that the huddled masses are the ones rising to the top. But not the ‘masses’ in the Communist concept. Under Communism the masses are controlled by the state. The State decides what is best for them and enslaves them, removing their free will and expecting them to toil for the state. But Lazarus understood something else. She understood the ‘yearning’. Yearning and striving were what drove America’s success. It was an internal striving. Unlike Hamilton’s vision of a Napoleonic striving, Americans have primarily focused on striving for themselves within the confines of the U.S.

The Iraq war encapsulates Lazarus’s poem. Zalmay Khalilzad was U.S Ambassador to Iraq from 2005 to 2007. He was born in 1951 in Mazari Sharif, Afghanistan. His father was an advisor to the last Shah of Afghanistan. When he was in high school he emigrated to the U.S, not long before Afghanistan began to fell apart in the 1970s. Although a Muslim he named his children Maximillian and Alexander. John Negroponte was American Ambassador to Iraq in 2004. Negroponte was born in London to Greek parents Dimitri John and Catherine Coumantaros Negroponte. His father was a Greek shipping magnate. His children are named Marina, Alexandra, John, George and Sophia. Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez was Commander of coalition forces in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. He was born to a poor Mexican family in Rio Grande, Texas. The current American commander in Iraq, General David Patraeus is the son of an immigrant from Holland named Sixtus Patraeus. His children are named Anne and Stephen. Anthony Zinni, who served in the Middle East before the war, was born to Italian-American parents in Philidelphia. John Abizaid, who was in charge of Central Command after Tommy Franks had vanquished Iraq in 2003, is a Lebanese-American from California. General J.H Peay III of Virginia was the commander of the 101st Airborne division during the First Gulf War. He is the descendent of an old Southern Family from Virginia.

What can we learn from this? When people have immigrated to the U.S their potential increases exponentially from what it was in their home country. This story of Greeks, Afghans and Mexicans who have risen to the top of the U.S military is symbolic of America. It is not an irony that several of them have gone back to their former places of origin and shown their former nations how things should be done. When Khalilzad became U.S Ambassador to Afghanistan this ethnic-Pasthun showed the pathway of America.

One must look no further than Europe to see this. Europeans cannot achieve in Europe what their descendants in the U.S have achieved. For many Europeans the only employment life can offer is the U.N or some NGO that helps African children. While these may seem like worthy pursuits, in truth they are not. A continent of do gooders does not accomplish anything. But look at the difference between American immigrants and immigrants to Europe. Immigrants in Europe hate Europe. They are not assimilated into society, three or four generations after their immigration they pop up as murderers, fanatics and extremists. They don’t ‘yearn to breath free’ but rather to enslave and murder people. Freedom is not part of the vocabulary of the immigrants who have made many European cities wastelands.

America has dealt with pernicious immigrants too. Those who have challenged the authority of America have been crushed under the thumb of the arsenal of democracy. There were the Nazis who popped up in the 1930s. There were the Anarchists who America had to round up and deport in late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are the Islamists. But let us look to Mr. Khalilzad. Had he been born in Europe he would today be calling relatives at one of those shady small computer/call centers that dot European cities and are used by immigrants to phone home. He would have an arranged marriage with a 12 year old Pashtun girl. His children would be named Mohammed and Abdul. He would wear a hoody and have only scorn and hate on his lips. This would be his pathway.

There are 300 million Americans. America acts as a force multiplier. Whatever a person would have accomplished had they not immigrated or their family not immigrated is multiplied by ten times. That means 8 million foreign born Mexican-Americans actually equal the productive output of 80 million Mexicans in Mexico. The millions of descendants of Anglos who lives in America represent the entire productive capacity of England today. America’s Germans are better than Germany’s Germans. How do we know that. One name. Wernher Von Braun, the German born, Nazi engineer, who emigrated to the U.S in 1945. Along with seven other German scientists he came to the U.S after the war under contract with the U.S army to help build weapons. In the Soviet Union meanwhile their rocket program under Sergey Korolyov imported trainloads of German scientists and pressed them into work. The Soviet work paid off in 1957 when Sputnik was launched into orbit. When Lyndon Johnson questioned Von Braun about whether “and the German scientists they captured, was it their Germans who got them up there first?” Von Braun replied “no, senator, our Germans are better than their Germans.” Why were the American Germans better? They were better because they lived in America. Does that sound arrogant? It should sound arrogant. Von Braun only had seven colleagues. The Soviets had deported train loads. But the desire, the yearning, led to the success of the American space program. It has always been the same story. America has been the nation of refuge for men like Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Albert Einstein. This cannot be replicated elsewhere.

What of the hatred for America? The world hates America. But who are they hating? When the French hate America. When the Chinese hate America. When Arabs hate America. They are hating themselves. When people speak about how terrible Americans are they are merely admitting their jealousy, for they wish their parents had had the foresight, or perhaps been such huddled useless masses, that they had moved to America. Hitler thought he could beat America with 60 million Germans. But our American Germans were better. They were better than Hitler. America didn’t need to send a mixed multitude to fight the Nazis. America could have just recruited from Among her ample German population.

Is it a surprise that Italians have been more successful in the U.S than Italians are in Italy? Is it a surprise that Indian immigrants are more successful in America than they could have been in India. Is it a surprise that an African immigrant to America, or his son, could be more successful than he would ever be in Africa. If Barrack Obama had stayed in Kenya with the Black farther he is so proud of and stayed with the African heritage he wears on his sleeve, as well as on his face, he would have been hacking people to death in the recent tribal warfare that has split Kenya.

Those who hate immigrants in the U.S are hypocrites. No doubt they should be angry at the injustice committed by the tidal wave of illegals who receive free health care and have overrun several American states and are implicated in large numbers of crimes. But it is not because these people are immigrants that they are so terrible, it is that they are ‘illegal’. Even the worst, most useless illegal immigrant, is nothing compared to the drag on the system that he would have been in Mexico. Mexico likes to complain about American immigration policies. But were Mexico to open the border there would no more Mexicans in Mexico. American Mexicans account for Mexico’s economy and without their remittances Mexico would collapse. When the Mexicans decided to stage a ‘day without a Mexican’ in the U.S they should have also staged a ‘day without Mexican remittances’ for Mexico. One would have watched the Mexican economy shrink by 17%. So who misses the Mexicans more? But had they been left in Mexico they would have contributed nothing. Because their potential is unfulfilled in a corrupt country.

People hate America for gun ownership. But it is the guns that earned America her freedom from tyranny. They complain about crime in the U.S. But is it better to have crime than be defenseless against state-sponsored crimes? Perhaps the victims of oppression at the hands of most governments in the world would disagree. They might like a right to bear arms. In Lebanon the Christians and Sunnis might like that right so that they would not be at the mercy of Hizbullah. But a gun in the hand of an American is more effective than in the hands of a non-Americans. Witness the deadly success of school shootings in the U.S. Even here the force multiplier is in action.

People can predict the fall of America. But when America falls it will be the world that is falling. America is the world. When Italian and Chinese and Anglo and Indian Americans fail it is China and Italy and England and India that fail. When America is overrun by Islamism it will only be after the whole world has succumbed to that satanic ideology. In the Peloponnesian war when the Athenians sent an army to invade Syracuse in Sicily it is said the Spartans sent one man, a general named Gylippus. One man. He was the force multiplier. When America was set to invade Sicily in 1943 it sent one man: Lucky Luciano, the American mobster. One Italian. America is not the new Sparta. America is better than Sparta. Sparta was an exclusive oligarchy of elite warrior supermen. America is the least exclusive society that produces supermen from the detritus of others. And those others are forever angry that this seemingly useless material was ignored, stifled and cast aside. Garth Brooks’ most famous song is ‘friends in low places’. For good reason. No one needs the storied pomp when they have legions of people yearning to breath free.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Jews Power and the Creation of the Palestinians

Terra Incognita
Issue 33
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

May 3rd, 2008

1) Jews, Power and the creation of the Palestinians: This essay is partly a rebuttal and elaboration on A.B Yehoshua’s recent comments and writings regarding the roots of Anti-Semitism. It is also an exploration of the roots of Jewish anti-Zionism. More than that, it is an exploration of the nature of the ‘other’, indigenous people, the concept of the ‘west’ and it proposes a radical theory regarding the Palestinians, namely that leftist anti-Zionist Jews have created a motif whereby the Palestinians have become the New Jews. They have created the imagery of an Islam that is ‘native’ to Israel and a Palestinian nation that is ‘indigenous’ to Israel. This essay is a ruthless assault on the very foundations of liberalistic secularism, the concepts of Orientalism and moral-relativism. It posits the theory that Jewish power and the creation of a Jewish majority in a state has necessitated the creation of a new Jewish identity among internationalist humanist Jewish thinkers and intellectuals.


Jews, Power and the creation of the Palestinians
Seth J. Frantzman
May 3rd, 2008


Just prior to the founding of the state of Israel a group of left wing intellectuals became concerned about the implications of what having a ‘Jewish’ state would mean. What were the moral implications of having a state run by Jews where Jews were the majority. For intellectuals used to seeing Jews as the struggling suppressed weak, pathetic, always pogromed minority it was an unsettling thought. The moral high ground is always with the minority, the ‘other’. Once the Jews became a majority they would lose their moral high ground. The first attempt to avert this catastrophe was made by the president of the nascent Hebrew University, Judah Magnus, the leading Jewish intellectual Martin Buber and a variety of others. It didn’t work.

Since the failure to prevent the creation of a Jewish state Jews have had to struggle with the idea that a Jewish state exists. A.B Yehoshua, one of Israel’s most celebrated authors, has taken the recent rise in Anti-Semitism as a signal to explore the enduring nature of anti-semitism and he has come up with the following view: “I think a 'defined identity' has more responsibility; it has limits, it is responsible for what it does. Amorphousness is a way to get away from responsibility," he says, adding, "I describe the facts. The Jew changes all the time. He can be assimilated without any visual indications of his identity, or he can distinguish himself, as does an Orthodox Jew. At the same time, he assumes the identity of whichever nation he occupies.” Thus for A.B Yehoshua the existence of Jews necessitates anti-semitism. One engenders the other.

Other leading Jewish intellectuals have interpreted things differently. Tony Judt, a leading European intellectual, one of the foremost scholars on post-war Europe and who, as the Economist reminds us was “born in Britain into a family of Jewish refugees” sees things differently. For him the role of Israel in the world is endlessly pernicious. He claims in his recent book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, after noting that his opinion is a ‘lone voice’ that Israel “is widely regarded as a-the-leading threat to world peace.” The italics are his. Forgetting about how Mr. Judt has used both the argument that he is a ‘lone voice’ and the argument that ‘most people agree’ in the same sentence, his perception that Jews, or Israel, is the greatest threat to world peace is not necessarily an anti-Semitic notion. One could just as well conclude that Mr. Judt is simply ascribing astronomical powers to his own people. He is thus a philosemite.

The view of Judt and Yehoshua, both of whome are Jewish, is interesting. On the one hand the existence of the amorphous Jew and his country, Israel, which, according to Yehoshua after the Six-Day war became amorphous because "Israel's clear-cut borders faded, as the nation once again started mixing with another people," creates anti-semitism and on the other hand Judt perceives Jews as an all powerful source for evil, a nation of 13 million threatening the peace of the world.

But what is most fascinating is the question of the minority. For Judt and Yehoshua the power of Jews threatens the world and engenders the hatred of them. So let us return to the period of the innocent Jews, the Jews who died in the Holocaust or the pre-Holocaust pogroms of the Catholic church and the Cossacks. These Jews are universally liked by Jews and gentiles. Jewish historians rarely condemn these people as engendering their own deaths or accuse them of threatening world peace (Bar Ilan Prof. Ariel Toaff’s book Bloody Passover in which he claimed that Jews really did murder Christian children for human blood is an exception).

In her book Healing the land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine Sandra Sufian argues that the project of eradicating malaria also took on a metaphorical dimension—erasing anti-Semitic stereotypes of the “parasitic” Diaspora Jew and creating strong, healthy Jews in Palestine. Sufian shows that, in reclaiming the land and the health of its people in Palestine, Zionists expressed key ideological and political elements of their nation-building project. But what is most fascinating is the fact that Sufian examines the “affects of land reclamation on the indigenous Palestinian population.” It is the word ‘indigenous’ that is most interesting here. Jane Kramer, a Jewish journalist and commentator recently authored an article in the New Yorker entitled ‘the Petition: Israel, Palestine and a tenure battle.’ In it she writes that Israeli archeology “dismissed or destroyed the evidence of other [non-Jewish] settlement, including fourteen hundred years of native Islam.” What is this ‘native Islam’ and who are these ‘indigenous’ Palestinians? Is it a coincidence that Jews, left wing intellectual Jews at least, have discovered indigenous Palestinians and ‘native’ Islam in Israel?

Leftist secular Jewish intellectuals in the early 20th century were primarily interested with either Socialism or the suffering of Jews. Secular Jews were interested in the fate of Jews in North Africa and the suppression of Jews in Eastern Europe. Through organizations such as the JDC or in France the Alliance Israelite, these Jewish minorities became cause celebres. They were the Darfur refugees of the 1920s. But with the destruction of European Jewry, the expulsion of the Jews of Muslim lands, the creation of Israel and the burgeoning wealth of the Jews in other countries the Jews lost there status as beleaguered minority. They simply were not the minority anymore because there were so few of them left in places such as Europe or North Africa. There were no more pogroms because there were few places that Jews still lived, outside the U.S and Israel, by the 1970s.

So Jewish intellectuals took an interest in Israel. They examined it through the new lenses of Anthropology and Sociology. They tried finding minority groups among the Jews in Israel. They discovered Mizrahim and Sephardim. But by and by these groups became uninteresting. They were suffering and there was much in the ‘Zionist narrative’ that could be condemned regarding their treatment at the hands of Israel, but they were part of the Jewish ‘hegemonic’ majority.

The generation of Jane Kramer and Sandra Sufian needed to find a Jewish minority to sympathize with. They found the Palestinians. This may seem strange. How can the Palestinians be a ‘Jewish minority’? The Palestinians were turned into Jews in order to suit the needs of Jewish leftists. The suppressors of the Palestinians took on the form of those who had long suppressed the Jews and Israel became an ‘Apartheid’ ‘Nazi’ state. Such labels are not rare among Jewish intellectuals. From Ilan Pappe to Noam Chomsky, Baruch Kimmerling, Norman Finkelstein, Neve Gordon and other well known Jewish academics and intellectuals the ‘Jewish State’ has become the new ‘Nazi’ and ‘Apartheid’ state, the sum of all evils. For Tony Judt it is the greatest threat to world peace.
Palestinian academics have become the new Jewish academics in the west. Edward Said and Walid Khalidi are widely adored by leftist Jews to the extent that one can even buy ‘I love Walid Khalidi’ T-shirts on Amazon.com. Jewish leftists invented the Palestinians. They didn’t invent them in the sense that they invented their existence but they helped invent their struggle and give them the stamp of ‘native’ and ‘indigenous’. Is it a coincidence that Jews found indigenous people in Israel? There are indigenous people in many countries in the world. But how is it that leftist Jews miraculously found indigenous people in Israel? It begs the question: what country are Jews indigenous to? For a leftist Jew like Jane Kramer, Tony Judt or Sandra Sufian there is no country that they are indigenous to. This is because they need to be members of the majority, the ‘hegemonic’ majority. It is not a coincidence that the same leftist Jews who describe Palestinians as ‘indigenous’ to Israel and describe Islam as ‘native’ to Israel are the same ones that describe themselves as ‘white’. Gerald Sorin, a Jewish Professor in New York, described himself in a recent Haaretz book review he wrote that he was “a white…Jewish guy.” He is not the first one to notice that Jews have become ‘white’ in the U.S. In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America Karen Brodkin explores the issue as has Eric Goldstein in The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Thus while secular leftist Jews have increasingly identified themselves as white, thus becoming part of the majority in America and Europe, they have increasingly discovered indigenous people who are not Jewish in Israel in order that the majority Jewish population can be defined as both ‘white’ and ‘colonialist’ and ‘racist’. Islam, a religion founded in the 7th century, has become ‘native’ to Israel. Certainly Judaism, which is 3,000 years old and Christianity which is 2,000 years old is not ‘native’ to the land of Israel.
Leftist Jews have a fear of being ‘native’. Ironically this amorphous identity is the one Yehoshua identifies as the one that is responsible for anti-semitism. Apparently Yehoshua is familiar with the basis of the Nazi hatred of Jews, which accused Jews of not being attached to the blood or soil of Germany. It is a fascinating story that has come full circle. In her polemic Jews and Power Ruth Wisse analyzes this very problematic conundrum, noting that “the way in which diaspora Jews' ‘harmful pattern’ of accommodation to majority power led them to look inward for culpability rather than outward toward their enemies.”
In the end the facts speak for themselves. Palestinians are not indigenous to Israel and Islam is not native. Both are invaders and colonists, albeit ones that showed up 1400 years ago. Israel is not the greatest threat to world peace, it is not possible that a country of 6 million can truly cause conflicts among 6 billion people (unless of course one adheres to the writings of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Jews have created the idea of indigenous Palestinians in order to avoid the question of Jewish power and the problem of being a majority and enjoying the notion of having their own country. Instead they have hidden behind extreme self-hate, delusion, blaming themselves for why people hate them and discovering other people that they can extend their sympathies to as the ‘new Jews’. It is no surprise that so many people compare the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza to the sufferings of the Warsaw ghetto and people say things like “how can we as Jews treat the Palestinians like this after our history of suffering.” Arnold Toynbee predicted in the 1950s that the Palestinians, because of their love for the land, would become the ‘new Jews’ if they were kept as refugees (he was also one of the first western writers to compare Zionism to Nazism). He couldn’t know how right he would be.
To some this idea seems far fetched and ridiculous. But how else can one explain the way in which those who hate Israel so much and blame it for causing all the conflicts in the world, people like Tony Judt, will also complain that it is unfair that Jews accuse them of being anti-semites. They say ‘on the contrary we believe the Jews should be a light unto the world, Tikkun Olam, Jews must be an example to the world.’ For them Israel is not Jewish and its people are not Jews, the Palestinians are the Jews because Jews are victims. They identify with the Palestinians and they compare their suffering to the suffering of Jews of old. The fact that the Palestinians have become ‘indigenous’ to Israel, the word Tony Judt also uses to describe them, shows how true this perception is. Modern leftist Jews aren’t the first to notice the connection. The Englishmen who worked for the Palestine Exploration Fund in the 19th century used to comment in the fund’s quarterly that the Palestinian peasants had ‘Jewish features’. It is no surprise that modern day archeology and especially the European and Palestinian variety supported by the ‘Denmark School’ and Israel Finkelstien argue that Judaism was neither monotheistic and nor was it ever indigenous to the land. Instead the Israelites, so these archeologists claim, borrowed their religion from the Assyrians, they even stole the so-called ‘Babylonian Job’ and co-opted it. Instead the Canaanites were the true inhabitants of the land of Israel and their blood flows in the Palestinian veins. Nadia Abu El Haj, who Jane Kramer defended in her New Yorker article is of such a belief. For Ms. Abu El Haj, Israeli archeology is the height of colonialism because it does not recognize the ‘native Islam’ and thus destroying sites Israel has deemed ‘Jewish’ such as Joseph’s Tomb (as the Palestinians did in 2001) is an act of resistance by Palestinians. Destroying history is thus ‘struggle’. Liberal Jews who see the Palestinians as the new Jews desire that this new Jewish history have its stamp on the land, what better way then to destroy the history of the other, the Israelite history.
The strange way in which Tony Judt sees the Israelis as being responsible for world conflict and at the same time writes so passionately about his fellow Jews such as Hannah Arendt and Arthur Koestler demonstrates that for him there is nothing Jewish about Israel. He cannot be an anti-Semite because he only hates Israel which would be like hating Somalia, it is so distant in relationship to him (except no one would be so far fetched as to blame Somalia for conflict throughout the world). In the film the Believer which depicts a Jewish Neo-Nazi in the U.S who is confronted by a former classmate turned Zionist, the Nazi says of the Israelis “those people aren’t Jews” and then notes “they act like storm troopers in the territories” to which another Jew replies “so do you hate them because they are Jewish or like them because they are like the Nazis?” Perhaps more poignantly the Neo-Nazi is later confronted with a right wing financial supporter of his group who he accuses of being a Jew and the man says to him “perhaps we are all Jews now.” The identity of Jewishness for Tony Judt, Sandra Sufian and Jane Kramer, is about being good. A Jew is good. A Jew heals the world. When a Jew does not live up to this expectation of being both good and a victim and an example then he ceases to be a Jew and scorn should be heaped upon him as a ‘Nazi’. A Croatian journalist living in Israel who was confronted once on why she would never visit a religious Jewish area and dress modestly but would wear a headscarf while visiting a religious Muslim place noted that “I expect more of the Jews.” Exactly. Religious Jews with their dirty sidelockes, their poverty stricken way of life. Those can’t be Jews because the Jew is intellectual, the Jew is always campaigning for some cause and he is a light unto the nations, healing the world, a humanist and an internationalist.
The recent letter signed by more than a hundred Jewish intellectuals in England merely proves the point. In the letter printed in the Manchester Guardian they noted that "We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary they will not be celebrating Israel' independence day… [Israel is] a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land…What the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians…. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations." Signatories include playwright Harold Pinter, and internationally known doctor Steven Rose, British Radio 4 broadcaster Mike Rosen, Daniel Machover, the judge who filed charges against IDF reservist Doron Almog, and Haim Bresheeth, the professor of communications at the University of East London. But what no one asked was why would they celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary? They are not Israeli. They are British citizens. They are not indigenous to anywhere. Their religion is not native to anywhere because they are of the opinion that the Palestinians are indigenous to Israel and that Islam is native to Palestine. Thus these Jews would never celebrate Israel's independence day. They aren’t Israeli. But it does beg the question why these British Jews celebrate any of the national holidays in the U.K given the fact that English history is also replete with massacres and the dispossession of other peoples. What rings true mostly is that here are Jewish people who are obsessed with a country that is not theirs. They don't issue statements in the Guardian decrying the independence day of any other country. Thus these people have come to view the Palestinians as Jews. This is clear because this level of vindictive visceral scorn towards Israel and its treatment of the native Palestinians is unique. Even before the Holocaust, with anti-semitism and the Nuremburg laws in Germany the Jews of England did not express such distaste for Nazism or Nazi Germany. These Jews have found an indigenous people in the one place where Judaism was born and that indigenous people they have labeled 'Palestinian' and they have put their national Jewish aspirations into the Palestinians and have an emotional bond with Palestinians to the degree that they support Palestinian self determination but never supported Jewish self determination, they label the Palestinians as 'native' but cannot label themselves as Jews as being native to anything, they learn Arabic and call Mohammed 'prophet' but they cannot speak Hebrew. This is the gulf that separates Israel from the Jews, especially leftist intellectual Jews. All over the world Jewish activists, for instance South Africa's Ronnia Kasrils and Nadine Gordimer, identify with every group that is not Jewish and they put their emotional love into these groups and identify so wholeheartedly with them that one must note that for these Jews these 'others' have become Jews.
Jewish philosophers were at the forefront of creating the theory of 'the Other'. Emannuel Levinas who was born in Lithuania in 1906 and emigrated to France where he became a philosopher was one of the central figures in fashioning this idea. He was an admirer of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (as was Hannah Arendt) but was dismayed when Heidegger worked hand in hand with the Nazi regime during the war (Hannah Arendt however was not dismayed, she continued a sexual affair after the war with this leading Nazi, testifying on his behalf even when she was penning Eichman in Jerusalem, an essay in which she blamed the Jews for their 'responsibility' for the Holocaust and in which she defined the Germans as merely 'banal' for their involvement). It is no surprise that the 'Other' was something Jews took note of since they were the classical other in European history. European anti-semites saw themselves as rooted in the soil and manly and brave and saw Jews as hook-nosed, rootless and cowardly. But what happens when Jews become a majority in their own country? Suddenly the 'other' becomes the majority that country and a new ‘other’ must be created. In Israel that means the Arabs. Thus the Arabs become the Jews. This is why Martin Buber and Judah Magnus were so afraid of having a Jewish state and why they formed Brit Shalom and argued for a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. For them the idea of a Jewish state was horrific because Jews would then become responsible and Jews would be to blame for having created an 'other' and that would necessitate Jewish intellectuals striving to skewer the Jewish state for its wrongs and its racism the way Jews had skewed European states for their wrongs towards minorities and Jews. But Israel was born. For Tony Judt and his ilk the breaking point was 1967. For Yehoshua the breaking point is also 1967 because it is then that the Jewish state became like the Jews of old in Europe: amorphous and without borders, rootless and nomadic, unattached to a soil. Twenty years. That was the gestation period. But in truth it is not twenty years. Already at the Eichmann trial in 1961 Hannah Arendt was noting the Jewish 'responsibility' for the Holocaust and already she was calling the hanging of Eichmann a 'crime' while making Eichmann's crimes merely 'banal'. It had already started, the drift of Jewish intellectuals away from Israel and towards the definition of the Palestinians as the classic 'other', or the New Jews. To understand the connection between Levinas, Magnus, Buber, Arendt, Judt and Yehoshua one does not have to step back to far. This is a small world of intellectualism. It is a world whose views should be obvious. But it is not obvious. Instead the views of these people are taken at face value. The views of the Jewish intellectuals in England who condemn Israel's independence day is taken at face value. They are merely concerned that Israel is not living up to her Jewish potential and they oppose her actions because they oppose all human rights violations. But no one dares ask: "do you celebrate independence day in the UK?". No one dares ask of Sufian or Judt or Kramer "What are you indigenous to? Where is your Judaism native?" Inevitably these are uncomfortable questions. But they are important questions. Anyone who claims the Palestinians are indigenous to Israel and Islam is native to the Holy land must then ask themselves "where am I indigenous to?" If Nadia Abu El Haj can be indigenous to Palestine, even though her mother is a Christian European, then Jane Kramer and Tony Judt and Sandra Sufian must be indigenous to something. Or is it, in Yehoshua's view, proper to hate Sufian, Judt and Kramer because they are not indigenous and therefore amorphous. But anti-semitism today is not directed at the rootless Jews such as Chomsky and Sufian. It is directed at the rooted ones in Israel. So Yehoshua has turned the whole state of Israel into a Jewish state, arguing that it does not play well with others. Judt too makes this claim in his book, asking Israel to 'grow up' and claiming that Europe has 'grown up' in the last sixty years. He means that Europe has become secular, has low birthrates and has no sense of nationalism. It has been easy for Europe to grow up. Europe already committed its crimes. But what type of putrid festering blood dimmed soil has Europe grown up on but the soil permeated with the destruction of European Jewry wrought by the Holocaust? Blood and Soil. That was the Nazi ethos. The Nazis did indeed soak the soil with blood, theirs and others. Judt cannot root himself in that soil. Israel has tried to mature but it is held back by others who accuse it of being 'conceived in sin' for its treatment of the Palestinians. One just wonders, are not the Europeans equally conceived in Sin because of their crimes in the Holocaust?
Case Study: Haim Bresheeth

Haim Bresheeth is not a name that is well known in anti-Israel circles. He is not on the level of a Pappe or a Chomsky. But he is part of the second tier of anti-Israel intellectuals (the third tier is the groupies and students with the 'I love Khalidi t-shirts). Haim Bresheeth's name came up when he signed the letter in the Guardian declaring that he, along with 100 other Jewish anti-Zionists, were not celebrating Israel's independence day. His letter included references such as asking us all to "acknowledge the narrative of the price paid by another people for European anti-Semitism and Hitler's genocidal policies." But to understand Mr. Bresheeth and see how he is a case study in our discussion we must examine him as a specimen of an anti-Israel fanatic.

His B.A and MA were from Tel Aviv University. His PhD, which he received in 1979, was from the Royal College of Arts and his PhD topic was "film language". He is the chair of Media and Cultural studies at the University of East London. He has taught in Israel at Sapir College and at Hebrew University. According to his biography he wrote a best selling introduction to the Holocaust called 'Holocaust for beginners in 1993. He also publishes regularly in Cairo's Al Ahram newspaper. His most recent scholarly publications have been on the subject of " The Continued Trauma and the Palestinian Struggle: Recent Cinematic Representations of the Nakba." He has written such edifying editorials as 'Sharon's Willing Accomplices' (a play on the famous book 'Hitler's willing executions') and 'Resisting Israel's Apartheid.' He has also written an editorial entitled 'Its not anti-semitic to criticize Israel.' He also considers himself an expert on "subjects such as Nazi films and their historical representation strategies, Fascist cinema of the spectacle." As an expert in film and television he authored a study commission by Israel's Ministry of Science and Culture entitled 'A comprehensive report on the state of Public Broadcasting in Israel, and outlining the necessary changes required in order to modernize the system.' In 1989 he authored a scholarly article entitled “The Israeli Self and Palestinian Other.” In his research on the other he became interested in Vampire movies and wrote ' Marking the Social other by Blood: The Vampire Genre.' As an academic he has received various grants including one research grant ($27,000 per annum) from the Israel Science Foundation, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities for research on 'The Other and Stranger in Recent European Cinema.' Despite receiving this money he is not, as he made clear, celebrating Israel's independence day. In the letter he signed that appeared in the Guardian he noted that the 'indigenous' Palestinians who fled Ramla and Lod referred to their ordeal as a 'Death March'.

Prof. Bresheeth is a fascinating case precisely because he combines so many interesting contradictions and themes. He is an expert on the Holocaust and has written about the development of the 'other' in European cinema. Thus he exhibits the classic Jewish interest in the 'other' which portrays Jews as an 'other' in Europe. He is very sympathetic to Jews who were victims of Europeans, the 'good Jews' who died in the Holocaust. He received his credentials from Israel. In fact Israel, the country he hates so much, has provided him with sustenance and teaching opportunities. This is a classic liberalistic reaction: bite the hand that feeds. When it comes to Arab daily newspapers such as Al-Ahram he preaches to the converted, instead of asking them to learn about the 'other' he preaches to the converted, calling upon them to hate Israel and asking them to care for their 'brothers' the Palestinians. The theory of the 'other' does not go for all societies, some societies, such as Muslim societies, get to wallow in the self. This is another classic liberal way of doing things. The liberal preaches self-critique at home, he opposes religion at home and he supports gay rights and recognition of the other, but when he is abroad in a place like Saudi Arabia he dons the necessary clothing and marches in lock-step with the prevailing opinion. He is the nationalist for the other. In Israel he is interested in Sunni Arabs. In Egypt he is interested in Sunni Arabs (as opposed to the Egyptian 'other', the Coptic Christians).

What is fascinating to note is how the narrative and dialectic of Nazism permeates the thinking of Bresheeth. He is an 'expert' on the Holocaust and he uses that imagery to define the things he hates today: Israel. Thus the Palestinians suffered a 'death march'. He claims that they called it a 'death march'. But it is not they who used this word, it is him. He created this element of Palestinian historiography in order to make the Palestinians into the Jews, since the Jews of Europe suffered a 'death march' then the Palestinians must have suffered one at the hands of the Zionist Nazis. Israel is the 'apartheid' state, a term that has been borrowed from radically like Bresheeth, Dugard, Gordimer, Virginia Tilley, Tutu and Kasrils by Palestinian activists. For Bresheeth the Jews are positive when they are the 'other' in Europe, but when they are known as Israeli then they become negative and a new 'other' appears; The Palestinians. Bresheeth is interested in the Holocaust and the Nakba because for him the two peoples are the same. The Jews who went to the gas chambers are like their Palestinian cousins who went on the Death March from Ramla. They are linked.

Bresheeth is the case study. He is not indigenous to anywhere. He notes that the Palestinians are 'indigenous' to Israel. He doesn't celebrate Israeli independence day but he takes $50,000 a year from the Israeli government and the Israeli taxpayer. For someone who compares Israel to a Nazi Apartheid state he is quite a collaborator. Luckily for Bresheeth his type of collaboration is not punished the way Palestinian collaborators (accused of giving Israel information) are by their fellow Palestinians. They are made to kneel on the ground and they are shot in the back of the head. Their families are exiled and their daughters raped. But those who shoot them in the back of the head are part of the 'armed struggle', they are 'freedom fighters' and they are the intellectual fellow travelers of Mr. Bresheeth, they are the 'other'. When an 'other' shoots someone in the back of the head it is called 'armed struggle'.
Back to the West
Judt wants to drag Israel kicking and screaming back to Europe. He claims that Israel is a European state made up of Europeans with European ideology, wrongly noting that the Ashkenazim are a majority in Israeli society, he claims that these European Jews (Ashkenazim as opposed to Sephardim) created a European state in the Middle East. Yair Sheleg, author of a recent editorial in Haaretz also says of Israel that "Israel is indeed discriminated against by the criticism leveled at it; not necessarily because it is a Jewish state, but rather mainly because it is a Western state." But Mr. Sheleg (whose name means 'snow' in Hebrew) would do better to note that it is perceived as a Western State. Ina Friedman of Holland wrote recently in a review of A Grave in Gaza that “for Western and especially Israeli readers, who have been isolated from their Palestinian neighbors by fiat, fear or enmity, it [the book] humanizes a community that ‘s largely been reduced to stereotypes and caricatures in our minds (in this description the Israelis are even more western than the westerners).” The dialectic of Israel is constructed so that it is Western so that its critics can continue the tradition, invented in the West, of finding an ‘other’. Since Israel is European and Western there should be Jews in Israel, there should be an 'other'. There are no more Jews in Europe, since the Holocaust, so Israel, being the last European country, the country that ceases to grow up, must have Jews, and those Jews are the Palestinians. There is no doubt in the minds of Sufian, Judt, Chomsky or Kramer or all the others that Israel is European. Demographics won't fool them. Even if they are forced to admit that of the Ashkenazim in Israel an ever increasing number are made up of religious Jews, the Shtetle Jews of old, the 'Ostjuden' who were so despised by Intellectual German Jewry (so despised in fact that after the Holocaust in Munich when some Ostjuden survivors demanded to have a share of the remaining Jewish assets in the city the 70 remaining German-Jewish survivors that had lived in the city before the war refused to share anything with their cousins from the East), the leftist will not admit that Israel is decidedly un-western. But how many 'western' people exist in Israel? Outside of the 25,000 Europeans who reside full time as aid-workers in Ramallah there are few Westerners in Israel. There are the aging Yekkes (German-Jews), but these make up a tiny segment of the population and their cultural flowering, which took place in the 1930s, and their attempt to dominate the academy, has long since run its course. There are French Jewish immigrants, but 90% of these are descendants of Algerian Jews, not Ashkenazim from France. There are the American Jewish immigrants but these are made up to a great extent of Yeshiva students or the newly religious, all of whome have embraced decidedly non-western views of the state and of life. The Russian Jews cannot be called Western as historically Western-Civilization has seen the Russian, the Orthodox Mongol Bolshevik horde, as an 'other'. In order for Israel to be western the leftist must ignore the decidedly brown features of many of the inhabitants of the country. Such is the reason that historiography of Israel latches on to the period 1948-1969. Judt speaks of the German-Jewish moshavs where the Jews spoke German and replicated Germany in their building materials (perhaps a fanciful belief, he is probably thinking of the actual German Templar communities of German Christians who became Nazis and were forced to leave Palestine by the British. Their five moshavs such as Bethlehem of the Galilee, Sarona, Wilhelma, and the two 'German colonies' were turned over to Jews in 1948). Judt remarks that the German-Jews looked down on the Arabs or ignored the existence of the Arabs, thus creating 'colonies' where Judt recalls them 'sipping lemonade' much as the British did in Kenya's 'white highlands'. Thus the German Jews become the Nazis, the colonists, the Yekkee immigration of the 1930s, which was caused by the Nazi rise to power, replicated the Nazi racism in Israel. So Israel is forced to assume the guilt of having allowed the German-Jews in because it is German-Jews who brought their European civilization to Israel. This is fanciful. Judt would say that Zionism is a version of European nationalism bred of the 19th century. Thus Israel becomes European. But by this logic so to the resistant movements of Africa, almost all of which were devoted to Socialism and Nationalism, were 'European'. But no one today would characterize Robert Mugabe or Laurent Kabila as 'western'. Why not?
This motif is a circle. It is a circle of self-definition and re-definition of the self and creation of the ‘other’ in order to please the self. It is the innermost need of every western self-hating leftist to find the ‘other’ to find something that he can blame himself for creating, to find some simple definition of the world that divides people into disadvantaged ‘black’ people and oppressive evil ‘conceived in sin’ ‘white’ people. He will go to any lengths to do it. He will re-define Jews as white. Then he will re-define Hispanics as white. Whatever it takes. He will turn non-western people into westerners. He will turn Sinhalese Buddhists and Indian Hindus into ‘radical fundamentalists’ just so that he can say ‘all world religions have fundamentalist terrorism’. Within every condemnation and every ‘human rights report’ and every protest and every editorial and every lecture one must find the seed that is the lie, the central problem that always reveals the truth behind seemingly benign intellectualism. When someone uses the word ‘indigenous’ or the word ‘native’ one must vigorously oppose and question the meaning of such words. When the word ‘other’ crops up it must be assaulted and brought out so that it can be seen for what it truly is. Words like ‘so-called’ must be examined to find their inconsistency. The mother of all insults ‘western’ and ‘nazi’ and ‘fascist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘colonialist’ and ‘imperialist’ must always be questioned and critiqued. The word ‘race’ and related words such as ‘multi-racial’ and ‘diversity’ and ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘multi-cultural’ and ‘moral-relativism’ must always be latched onto so at to not allow people to infuse their beliefs with such strange ideas that Barack Obama is a ‘mixed-race, multi-ethnic African American’(An actual quote from Gerald Sorin). When Obama’s pastor, the now infamous Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was speaking recently to a black congregation he gave a convoluted explanation of how the ‘white brain’ is subject oriented and the ‘black brain’ is object oriented to convey his theory that standardized testing and teaching is racist. But Mr. Wright. You are half white so which brain are you thinking with today? It reminds one of the old riddle. A man comes to a cross roads and there is a man there. The person declares that he lies every other day. What question can you answer him to find out which way to go (assuming he knows the way)?
‘If I asked you yesterday which way to go what would you have said?’ Whatever he says, do the opposite.
The same could be said for liberalism. Whatever it says, whether it is telling us that prostitution is actually feminism or that genocide is justice or that terrorism is armed struggle or that Palestinians are native. Do the opposite. Assume the opposite.